Bi-Lateral Pulmonary Embolism

Whirrrrrrrr.

This room is large. It's quiet, except for soft humming, and bleeps from a computer console. At intermittent moments, the console emits a soft chirp that's almost musical. A technician, female, in her fifties, in a burka, stands in the corner fiddling with controls.

The walls are beige, the machine is white. It's a cage, twelve feet high and more than that wide, with racks and rollers that allow large scanners to float over a long stretcher in the center of the room, where I lay. The is the VQ scan machine.

Whirrrrrrr.

The machine coasts over me. Heavy-looking apparatus comes with inches of my head.

"Breathe deep for three minutes. Don't stop breathing. Deep breaths."

She places a plastic hose in my mouth.

I inhale, breathing radioactive isotopes into my lungs. These have a half-life of six hours. Hear about the controversy on the news about the nuclear reactor being shut down in Ontario? The one the government said would create a medical crisis because it supplies half of the world's supply of medical isotopes? This is one of those medical machines. I'm the one who needs those.

Whirrrrrr.

Coast, scan, coast scan. Listen to my own breathing.

Bleep. Whiiirrrr. Bleep.

"And we're done."

She helps me off the stretcher, back on my wheeled stretcher, and sets my in the hall. This part of the hospital is dead silent, and dark. Because it's the weekend. It's an unsettling change from the noise and pace of the emergency room I was just taken from.

"So... what kind of radiation is this?"

"It's less than you would get from a chest x-ray. Don't worry."




Let's step back 24 hours, to the trauma room.

It's a blur of action. A tech rushes in and takes blood. They want to check my hemoglobin level to see if and how much I've hemolized.

A student nurse sticks me with a IV in my left arm, the only other good spot on my body to draw blood. It hurts like hell and bleeds all over the side of the bed. This is just in case I need an emergency transfusion. The ambulance team already got my right arm, so who knows where the techs will draw from now. A mobile x-ray team wheels in a takes a snap of my chest in less than thirty seconds.

The blood results are back, it hasn't even been ten minutes.

Doctor Hamilton walks in, shaking her head.

"98."

Mom, Vanessa, Me, Hamilton. Our collective jaws drop.

This is exactly what it was when I left. I'm not hemolizing.

"We're thinking it's a clot."

My mind fuzzes. The said something about this prior to surgery... what was it? I can hardly remember.

...I might get a clot in the vein along my pancreas, beside where my spleen was. But the likelihood is a fraction of percentage. Wait... I'm on thinners! I've been in blood thinners since before surgery!

"We'll send for a CAT Scan or a VQ, whichever is available first. That will tell us."

There's nothing else for Hamilton to do. They ship me to emergency to wait for a bed.

Sitting in emergency, I find out that everyone at church was told I'd relapsed badly and been driven by ambulance to the hospital. Great. Then my friend Chris and his wife Jody jumped in his car and sped into Edmonton.

My mom meets him in the emergency waiting room, and comes back to see me.

"Chris is here."

"Really? Send him in!"

"They won't let him 'cause he's not family."

"What?"

"Yeah, he's really shook up. He was shaking and crying."

I'm confused and touched. I don't care that much about my health.


Chris will later come over for dinner after I'm out of the hospital and tell me about that day:

"I was in bad shape. I was driving crazy."

Chris is an engineer who forensically reconstructs car accidents. Chris also drives like an engineer who reconstructs car accidents and looks at photos of people who were involved in those accidents.

"Yeah, I was just thinking about you, and driving, and praying and stuff, and the thought struck me, 'Oh God... I need to have more beers with him!"

Brotherly love works in funny ways.



In emergency, Miles, my father in law, visits for a while, and leaves. He's not doing much better than Chris was. Really, I'm doing fine now. I think.

The clock strikes ten, and my mother leaves.

I'm an expert at this now. I wheedle a sleeping pill and an additional pillow. I convince the nurse to take off my yards of cables and monitoring equipment. I turn, position, don't disturb the IVs. Trust the sleeping pills. Ignore the yelling outside the curtain.

Sleep.