The Fateful Chestnut
On a cool March day, I was taking my daily 4-mile walk when suddenly – and stupidly – I tripped on a chestnut that had fallen on the wooden boardwalk that winds through the woods. Sadly, this chestnut was not roasting on an open fire; it had fallen on the walkway the previous autumn and somehow managed to make a home there.
Or maybe it was destiny. Maybe it was placed there by an unseen force – or maybe it was just the wind. Or perhaps, more sinisterly, it was put there to attack me and ruin my life!
Or maybe not.
Maybe in the grand scheme of things, I’m no more important than a grain of sand on some unnamed beach thousands and thousands of miles away. But I like to think that I am a bit more important than that – and I’m sure you do too.
Anyway, that fateful chestnut ended my years of walking 4 to 6 miles a day and began my never-ending trip into medical purgatory. When I say “trip,” I mean trip. I tripped my way onto the never-ending medical treadmill, and it all started with my family doctor – nowadays referred to as a GP – who I call Dr. House. He’s even listed in m phone contacts as Dr. House. I’m not kidding. Do you remember the TV series, “House, MD”? If you do and you’re dying to watch it again, it’s on Amazon Prime and other streaming services. Gregory House, MD, is my hero. You can even, as they say, binge-watch it – all eight seasons.
Anyway, I suffered some scrapes and bruises to my right side and injured my already fragile right hip. I got through April pretty well, but by the middle of May, I started experiencing a lot of pain in my right hip, right leg, and lower back. So much pain, in fact, that instead of looking forward to walking every day, as I had for years, I started dreading it. But, I, the ever intrepid walker, walked on until I couldn’t.
By the first of June, I began to miss some of my walking days and went to see Dr. House. He suspected osteoarthritis in my right hip aggravated by several hard falls, including the latest masterpiece in March. He wanted me to get X-rays. Nah! Let me walk on, I said. Just give me more pills!
I ended up getting 10 days’ worth of steroids (Prednisone), and I started walking without pain again. For a little while. It was magic. Give me more I told him. Then he told me about the side effects, some serious. More prednisone was not forthcoming… yet.
“Get those X-rays,” he told me. I got them – my right hip was completely gone. The joint, the ball and socket, was all deteriorated. There was no more cushioning cartilage left.
I had to come to grips with being an old, feeble man. It finally happened to me!
I hobbled through the rest of June and into July, and then I started feeling ill. So, not only was I hurting, but I was sick. I was sick most of July, and my walks became shorter and more infrequent.
By the first of August, I started losing weight. Not that I didn’t need to lose weight, but I was losing weight without trying. Very worrying. Nothing tasted right. The only thing I could eat was chicken noodle soup.
By mid-August, I felt like I was going to “drop off”. I was very sick. So sick, in fact, my son came and took me to the hospital. It was around 5 PM, but I thought it was 5 AM. “What are you doing here so early in the morning?” I asked him. He told me it was afternoon, not morning.
I don’t remember much until waking up in the ICU with a nurse giving me a breathing treatment. I had IV lines in both arms. I must have been out of my mind the previous night because the nurses all said I was a completely different person from the hellcat that was brought in the night before.
Of course, hospitals and doctors like to perform every test imaginable, usually in the middle of the night. I had at least 12 “labs,” which are blood tests to me. I had CT scans and X-rays. The CT scans scared me since I assumed my organs were all turning to stone, or they’d find some untouchable, speadiing, weird mass that was destined to become my own, personalized introduction to the grim reaper.
Of course, the blood tests showed a lot of bad stuff, so I wasn’t sure if I was seeing empathy in the doctors’ eyes or pity. Maybe I was just seeing the “another old man on his way to the river Styx” look. I’m sure old people on their last legs are big business.
With all those blood tests proving I was lucky to still be alive, the doctors insisted they were going to save my lungs with breathing treatments. The only problem with that was that there was nothing wrong with my lungs, except that I was allergic to the first IV antibiotic they gave me, which caused me to choke and gasp for air.
My lungs and my alcohol-free liver are about the only things that were still working right.
It turns out that I had sepsis that had started with a UTI that I had ignored. I was only worried about walking. Heck, I never knew sepsis could kill you. About 20% of those who are diagnosed with it die from it. And it can take months or even years to completely recover from it… It’s been 3 months so far, and I still don’t feel like myself. Maybe I never will
According to all the “ologists”, I shouldn’t be above ground. But every day above ground is a good day, right?
Now I’m a passenger on the long doctor train. I have all kinds of “ologists” and all kinds of doctors’ appointments and endless tests and so on. With all the long faces of the “ologists,” even I sometimes wonder how I manage to keep on going.
Maybe that fateful chestnut wasn’t so unlucky after all?