Damn, Getting Old Sucks! (Ended up in the ER Last Night w/Blood Clots in my lungs)

[Joe_K]

Hope your recovery process is smooth. Take it easy man, we like to push ourselves too hard sometimes, especially when healing up.

Velocitas, Opprimere,
Violentia Operandi

[fportmen45]

Hope you feel better soon, man.

With regard to the hospital bill, negotiate it. If you need some ideas, please feel free to send me a PM.

[Grant H.]

With regard to the hospital bill, negotiate it.

This.

I didn't have insurance when I had my appendix taken out a couple years ago, and just by calling and talking to each of the people that sent me a bill (every person involved sends a separate bill) they all knocked 25% or more off for a cash payment.

Also, ask for itemized bills. My initial hospital bill magically dropped over $2k when I asked for that.

[Jer]

Hey everyone, sorry for the delayed response. I forgot that I had this open in a tab on a PC that I don't use frequently so I forgot to update.

Most of you have seen me post occasionally in other threads on this forum so it will come to little surprise to most of you that I'm still alive and annoying. lol

The first several days of this was a whirlwind but I quickly got back to my life about as normal as I could have expected. I took the last four days of that week off and was back in work full time starting the following Monday or one week from the ER visit. Not too shabby.

Up next was working out. None of the specialists/doctors could tell me to not workout but instead told me that being active and not sedentary was good for me. They said to listen to my body and my primary care physician even said that my cardio would likely be the limiting factor for months and wasn't worried about me even having the breath to push my body. Wrong! lol

[Warning: annoying Crossfit talk ahead] I went back to my first Crossfit workout the Friday night of the week I went back to work or about 1.5 weeks after the ER visit. The plan was to take it easy and see how my body responded. The workout was a three person team workout and two of the coaches selected me to be their teammate. I attempted to warn them that if they were trying to go after the top time set by a three-coach team in the previous class they might want to get another teammate as I couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't be flat on my back after 1min of working out. That's okay they said, we'll go whatever pace you want. It was three stations of rowing for calories, bench press and then this crazy lunging & overhead press movement that sucked. I started out at a light pace and slowly worked my way up little by little. 10min in I actually felt great and started pushing things a little bit more. It was a 21min cap workout and by the 17th minute I was literally telling the coach and co-owner to hurry the hell up because he was holding me back. Haha! I was pleading with them to hurry up so we could catch the record set that day and I couldn't believe when I heard myself telling two of the fittest guys at our Crossfit to hurry up because they were slowing us down. We hit the 21st minute and when everyone else collapsed to the floor spent I kept going. After a week and a half of not knowing if I was going to drop dead at any moment or any answers as to why it happened or what I could do to prevent future events and just general confusion and lack of answers to my health I was finally back to being me. I put in another 2min or so and I couldn't have felt better. I felt more alive in that 25min or so than the previous ten days combined. Needless to say I went back to Crossfit full time immediately and I've been going 6 days a week since.
[/Crossfit talk]

My pain levels subsided a couple of weeks after the ER trip and now it's only occasional discomfort. I'm on blood thinners for life (most likely) and I came to terms pretty quickly with that revelation. I'm just glad it's easily treatable and wasn't serious. Well, that is to say that it was incredibly serious from what I've been told and what I've read but at least it wasn't emergency surgery open heart surgery or some crazy life-changing treatment after the event or any number of things that could have been FAR worse than taking a pill every day and trying not to cut myself.

Thanks to everyone who replied and was concerned about my well-being. Thanks to those who didn't post here but reached out to me using other methods of contact. This is a great community and one I consider family... no matter how dysfunctional most of us are at times.

[buffalobo]

Glad all is well.

I even read the CF stuff. Good on you.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

[Irving]

Yup, glad your able to have your life be normal still.

[brutal]

taking a pill every day and trying not to cut myself.

Glad you're doing well.

Even the cutting or scrapping yourself a little on occasion is certainly manageable, just takes more/longer pressure. A shaving nick can fuck up your timetable though.

[Gman]

Glad to hear you've bounced back so quickly!

[TFOGGER]

Glad to hear you're back at it, crossfit and all!

[SSChameleon]

So I had to search for this thread, I remembered reading it and I had almost the same experience. About two weeks ago I had a knee scope. All went well and I was feeling good, starting PT. I woke up Friday and felt like I had slept wrong on my back. Throughout the day I had back spasms that got worse each time they hit. By 10:00 that night I was laying in bed and couldn't get the pain to stop. It had spread from my back to my back and abs.

My wife called sitter for the kids and took me to the ER. Between my cycling and three kids I have been in too many ERs. Parkview has the best one I've been in so far. Ultrasound showed a clot in my leg behind the knee, CT scan showed PE in bottom of both lungs. Looks like I'll be on thinners for 6-12 months. The worst part (other than the spasms) were the vampires coming in all night to draw blood, and the shot in my stomach. Every time I would start to fall asleeep some guy wearing nitrile gloves would show up and poke a new hole in me.

Jer- your story is encouraging. I am a very active guy and my biggest fear from the knee scope to the blood clots is the impact to being out and about. Moral of the story, when abdominal and back pain hit a 10 on the scale and the meds are having little to no impact, go get it checked out.