Today is May 7th. A day that would not stand out for most people, including me if it wasn’t for Facebook’s memories feature reminding me of the posts informing the world that today, four years ago, my life would forever change in a way that no one should ever have to go through. I would never wish this life on my worst enemy, but it is the life that I have now. And as anyone would do, I make the best of what I have left. If even one other individual can be inspired to go to the doctor, be inspired to get into shape, learn how to help out a family member, or any other way to improve their life or the world around them based off of my life and sharing my story, it gives me and what I am going through that much more value. Believe it or not, that has inspired me to keep fighting at points of this journey as well, knowing that I have inspired others.
Now that I have this blog and have made some progress on mentally processing everything I have been through, I should go back and explain as much of the road that got me here.
Most people who knew me in 2015 were utterly blindsided by the news that I had been life-flighted to Billings, MT in the middle of the night. However, to a few, mainly my wife and family, this was not that shocking. For many years I had been experiencing a flutter in my chest. The very first time I can remember this was running during football practice in 7th grade. It was about the time that I had started immunotherapy for allergies, so the symptoms were attributed to the allergy shots. These continued but were nothing like the bigger one I experienced during football practice, so I felt like as if this was something that everyone experienced.
The next notable time this sensation came up was February of 2014. I had just finished DJ’ing at a bar in Glendive, MT. It was 2 in the morning; I had been awake for about 20 hours at that point. The music had ended, the lights came on, soaked in sweat, and dehydrated I was walking to the edge of the stage to chat with people as they were walking out of the bar. When I got to the side of the stage, I went to shake someone’s hand, and as I reached for their hand my chest started to flutter, my vision formed a tunnel around their hand, and everything began to spin as I have never experienced. I thought I was going to fall, so I backed up to where my turntables were and laid down and put my feet up on the amplifiers. I honestly can’t tell you how long I laid there thinking that those may be the last minutes of my life. It honestly crossed my mind that at least it was a good show and my last evening was playing music. But after a while everything went entirely back to normal. Those were tough days, as my business partner and I both had regular day jobs. Then we would have to flip around and work long hours into the night. So, those waking hours on a Friday were solid working hours; if we weren’t on the clock at one job, we were preparing to DJ. Again, I used that as an excuse for what had just happened. It seemed to fit. I was tired, thirsty, a long day of concentrating; so laying down, sipping water and deep breathing fixed it.
In the days after this, it did not get better, and I did go to doctors. The thing is, if you don’t fit the profile of a standard patient with a problem, it seems that it is prevalent that you will be misdiagnosed. In my case, I was young, not overweight, seemingly healthy other than dealing with depression and occasional insomnia at times. So when I went to more than one doctor describing what had happened, I was diagnosed with panic attacks.
Around the holiday season of 2014, life started to get more tough for me. I began to fight gastrointestinal issues, which I had struggled for years but got notably worse at the end of 2014. For readability for some, I will not go into much detail on THAT matter in this post. Around Christmas, I developed a deep cough, so deep that I was coughing up blood at times. That was the last holiday that I spent with my mother and sisters together, and I was so sick that I barely remember it. They spent part of their vacation cleaning my house to help me since I was having a hard time getting out of bed. When I went to the doctor, it was a quick listen and diagnosis of the standard cold going around. I would get “better,” but I never felt 100%.
Sometime in the spring of 2015, I started to develop severe lower back and leg pains. Walking was no longer something I took for granted. I was secretly spending most of the night awake taking long hot soaking Epsom salt baths. I would occasionally try to go to a doctor, but it felt futile. When my legs started to look like they belonged to someone that weighed 2 or 3 times my weight, a doctor who apologized for being spread too thin just sent me to have an ultrasound to make sure there were no clots. When there weren’t clots, he diagnosed me with cellulitis. Not surprisingly, the antibiotics did not reduce the size of my legs. So I went on to get a second opinion.
The next doctor looked at my previous diagnosis, laughed and told me that I could stop the antibiotics immediately. Their thought was that everything had to do with something going on in my lower back, so they ordered an MRI that ended up showing that I suffered from degenerative disc disease. Finally, there was a test that had substantial evidence for something going wrong. I began physical therapy with a great physical therapist and I did my exercises, but I felt a little worse every day.
To the people around me, I managed to keep a pretty regular schedule. I didn’t miss many, if any full days, of work at the credit union where I was working. I was on the city council and fulfilling all of those duties. Ashley and I had recently gotten engaged, but were living thousands of miles apart. I needed to finish renovating my house and sell it so that we could live together in Florida. So, on evenings that I didn’t have meetings, I was working on my house.
The last weekend in April, Ashley flew up to Montana to help me paint and do whatever was needed on my house. The house was not what needed the most help that weekend. Sadly I was growing sicker, and a lot of the time we spent together that weekend was trying to find ways to help me feel better. I had pretty much stopped eating; walking a block was all but impossible. Ashley knew I had been seeing doctors in my area and told me that when I dropped her off at the airport that I needed to go to the hospital in Billings. I told her I would, and I meant it when I said it. One of the things that have kept me fighting at times, but has also very much led me to my downfall, has been my stubbornness. So after I dropped her off at the airport, I convinced myself that I was stronger than I was and that I just needed more time; eventually, everything would work out. Multiple doctors had told me that it wasn’t anything significant. I was young; I had a lot of things going on. My flawed thinking led me to believe that it wasn’t the best time to get sick, and if I was ill, I could tough it out until a better time. At least, to my best recollection, that was my reasoning. No matter what the actual reason I defied Ashley’s orders, my plans backfired a week and a half later.
May 6th was going to be a regular long day, and I knew it was going into it. But I had no idea how long it would be. I had a full day at work, the agenda for the city council meeting seemed like it would be one that would extend into the later hours. Little did I know that I would not sleep at all for almost 40 hours. After the city council meeting concluded I felt worn out, so I texted my boss to ask for the morning off so I could go to the doctor again. Then, I skyped with Ashley, and we tried to make plans to meet up somewhere between Florida and Montana. I was frustrated because booking anything was extremely difficult that night, so I conceded and went to bed. After rolling around in bed unable to fully catch my breath and suffering from a general, “my body is betraying me feeling,” I called my mother since I knew she was the only other person potentially awake at that hour in town. My stubbornness (maybe stupidity would be more accurate) came back, and when I spoke with my mother, I asked if I could crash on her couch just in case I got worse overnight and MAY need to go to the hospital. When my mother got to my house, she strongly suggested that we go straight to an emergency room and after a few minutes of contemplation, I agreed. We decided to give the emergency room in Miles City, MT another try, so after midnight on May 7th, we left on the 82-mile journey.
Do you ever have those moments that seem too calming as they are happening, that you know the storm is coming? That is what happened on the drive to Miles City that evening. I remember a sense of peace leaving Baker’s city limits, even saying to my mother as she was driving, “You don’t have to rush, it will be nice to have the time to chat.” or something to that effect. The thought even crossed my mind, “this would be weird if this ended up being the last time in a very long time that I was back here,” but clearly, that seemed impossible. I had jobs, a house, pets, and so many loose ends to tie up before I could ever think about leaving.
When we got to Miles City, I got checked in at the front desk, but the wait ended up being hours before they would let me in a room. There was a stabbing that evening, and for some reason, in that small town emergency room, it meant that nothing else could happen until the stabbing victim was out of the ER, one way or another. After a couple of hours, I could finally go back, and the doctor ordered x-rays, an EKG, and blood work. Soon after the tests were done, the doctor came back in mumbling and asked if I did meth. I laughed and said no. He continued to ask about other drugs, and I told him no. As he was leaving, he mumbled something that sounded like the size of a football and said louder, “I will be right back.” A few minutes later he returned and explained that my heart was huge and not pumping right. I needed to go to Billings and see a cardiologist right away. I asked if my mother could drive me and when he explained, “if anything goes wrong between here and there, there is no one to do anything. We have a helicopter on the way right now.” That is when things started to sink in.
As I was being loaded into the helicopter in Miles City, I had about a million thoughts and feelings going through my mind. Believe me, not ONE of those was on the positive side of the spectrum. For the helicopter ride, they belted me into a gurney and zipped me into something best described as a body bag, but your head sticks out. I was groping for anything in my brain trying to find something for comfort. As luck would have it, the sun was peaking over the horizon as the helicopter left the ground. That would be just enough to give me a sense of comfort for a few minutes into the flight. Then, the IV diuretics kicked in. When they offered to catheterize me before the trip, I had not experienced IV Lasix before, and I turned down the catheter, inadvertently developing a new torture technique midflight. I don’t know if it was the pressure that suddenly emerged in the bladder, never learning to pee into a bottle while laying down or the stage fright of having flight paramedics watching, but when they loosened the straps and gave me a urinal, I was still unable to go. As soon as we landed and I could stand, I filled one full liter urinal and part of another. Over the next few days, I would lose around 20 pounds just from retained fluid, or what one doctor called cellulitis.
(To Be Continued…)
