The doctors I have been to all ask the same question, “Why did you get a blood clot?” besides the obvious answer of “You’re the fucking doctor, you tell me!” it really is a long sorted tale, that started in the fall of 1992. That is the year I graduated high school and was about a month from starting college at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. My friend Todd Cox and I were driving around downtown in his car and we pulled up to some girls we knew form school and they asked us what we were doing. We said nothing, wasting gas and they said why don’t we go with them to take their friend home. We agreed, pulled over and parked and hopped in their car.
We drove down O street on our way to drop one of the girls off. I remember passing 40th and O’ thinking I live just down that street and literally the next thing I can recall is a blurry white light and a woman talking to me.
About 8 blocks from my last memory we ran a stop sign and were hit by a Blazer. Honda Civic vs Blazer. No contest! We LOST! the Blazer struck the car on the back passenger side. We flipped, rolled into someones front yard and laid on its side. Everyone piled out of the car except for me. I was unconscious. Of course I found all this out later from people filling me in when they would visit me in the hospital.
The back seat of the car had Anna, Todd and I, in that order from left to right. The blazer hit us and crushed the car in nearly halfway, the girls told me when they went to the junk yard and looked at it. Where I was sitting physically didn’t exist after the accident. The car was on its side my side up. Todd told me I was leaning on him unconscious, with blood streaming down my face dripping on to him. He had nightmares about it for a few weeks afterward. After a moment or two, I came to mumbled something and pulled my leg free of the front seat, it had gotten wedged there, right above the ankle, and passed out again.
When the ambulance came Genny rode with me to the hospital, and hers was the woman’s voice I recalled hearing, although, at the time I couldn’t identify it. Her voice and another woman’s, the girl driving, and then my mother were the first voices I heard. I only recognized my mother’s voice. At this point all I could see was a blurry white light.
My mom talked to me in that soothing reassuring mom voice one that had been reinforced with comforting tones for years working as a nurse and PA. I told her “mom, I think we were in an accident and …and…and I lost my glasses!” I blurted that out and started crying!! Loosing my glasses was always a huge deal, we were poor and they were super expensive, so apparently that was on my mind. When i said that my mom started laughing and said “No hon, they aren’t lost I got em right here. One of the girls picked them up.” and everything was wonderful. That was likely due to the fact I had been shot full of morphine.
So, the impact broke my right femur, into what they call a butterfly facture, two different angled breaks in the bone, that resemble a butterfly on the Xray. I had a rod place in the femur which I kept in for four years. The most vivid moment was the following day when they set my leg. They had to immobilize it until the surgery. This entailed them PUSHING a pin, which looks like a thinnish knitting needle through the bone about two inches below my knee. They gave me shots to deadened the area and had my mom hold my hands so i wouldn’t hit them while they were doing it. That remains a brilliantly strange sensation to this day. The exact spots they did it had no feeling but I could feel my joints at the knee and ankle moving and pressure on them from the doc forcing this thing through my bone! There was this initial instinct of “OMG punch this guy in the head! Hes hurting you!!!” but it was all fine. Instinct vs intellect.
Two week after I came home from the hospital I was limping around the house and one day i noticed every time I stood up my foot turned purple. My mom, yep we gotta go to the hospital, you probably have a blood clot. It didn’t hurt at all, just turned color. The ultra sound tech started high on my inner thigh and worked his way down my leg until he found the culprit. Hiding in my lower calf was a clot. I was admitted to the hospital and was given blood thinners and they check my blood every 15 minutes for the first 12 hours or something. I remember burse coming in during the night and barely woke up when they stuck me.
92 = blood clot
2003 = cat bite on calf that got so infected I got woozy and nearly fell down, tooth paste like pus oozed out the wound!
2005 = fell off my bike and crushed my right foot, 8 -9 months before I was back to 100%
2007 = minor sprained ankle
Dec 19, 2009 = playing with neighbors kids, stepped off the curb wrong waiting for a car to go by and sprained my ankle. Next day flew back to NE. Two days after that took a 12 hours car ride to MN. Four days in hospice caring for my mom. 8 hour car ride back to NE. 3 days caring for mom in hospice. next week doing funeral stuff. Fly home to AZ.
March 23rd got to emergency room leg filled with pain, hard to breath. One ultra sound later = right leg is clotted (the entire thing). One chest scan later = Bi-lateral embolism with right saddle embolism.
When people ask, how’d this happen, its a loaded question and goes back years and years! I hoping they perfect cyborg legs soon, I have a feeling I’m going to need one!