ChanDeereGreen

So – two trips to the ER. Every test an ER can do. There is nothing at all wrong with me. I’m in*perfect* health. (Okay, that part is good, and I am grateful.) Except for the part where it really hurts to breathe.  I have been aware of and pretty well in control of my breath my whole life. Literally. My mom is a yoga teacher. She taught me how to take slow full complete breaths… probably before she taught me to tie my shoes. Five years of vocal music lessons – I can’t sing a note, but you had better believe I can breathe from the diaphragm.

But now all of a sudden, I have no control over my breath. And I’m not gonna lie, it is freaking me out a little.

A week and a half ago – Saturday, the 19th. I took a Sabbath. No kidding.  I had been busy every weekend for months – photo shoots with Bo, CMA events, weddings,  work days, baby showers, travel to VA for school – always something. And Sundays are a day of worship for me, but they aren’t really a “Sabbath” because of the amount of work that we do to set up and tear down our church. So Saturday I told Bo that I was not doing anything. I literally laid on the couch, surfed the internet, and scratched my dogs all day long.

Apparently that much rest is bad for me.

At one point mid-afternoon I got up to make a sandwich. Somewhere around spreading the almond butter, I noticed that I was a little short of breath. Weird. I’m in pretty good shape, walking to the kitchen doesn’t usually wind me. The rest of part one of my saga is here.

So, by the end of Part 1 I had come to the conclusion that it was allergies, dog hair, dust, maybe mildew from the ducts. Yeah, um … no. That wasn’t it.

We went over every square inch of floor, with the Dyson, four times. Dusted everything that couldn’t run away from us with very good ostrich-feather and microfiber dusters that hold everything, not the kind that just kick the dust up into the air. Brushed everything that  could run away from us. Changed the vent filters, with special attention to installing the super-mega-ultra-allergenic-millionth-of-a-micron gold standard filters. I felt better, some. So, that was all probably a pretty good idea. (It’s definitely all stuff I should do a lot more often, with or without the silly breathing thing.)

But then we went over to our friends’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. My friend is a neat-freak. I’ve never seen dust in her home. And she only had one small, not particularly shed-happy dog (a miniature dachshund.) And I was still periodically noticing, especially when I was standing up or walking, that I was breathing fast and shallow at the very top of my lungs.  And the instinctive response when you notice that you aren’t breathing well is to try to breathe deeper. Which now really seriously hurts. So that’s scary. And when you are scared you breathe faster, and… it all gets in a handbasket and rolls on down from there, unless I get really conscious of the situation really fast and make a very specific, very focused effort to get it under control. Which I can, yay! But only by breathing really unnaturally slowly, from the abdomen only, holding my chest muscles completely still.

And then came Saturday. Beautiful day. Woke up feeling pretty good. (sidebar – I can breathe just fine when I’m lying down. Mostly okay when I’m sitting. It gets bad when I stand, and really bad when I walk more than a block.) Got on the motorcycle (backseating on Steve, Krea is still… becoming beautiful) and rode to CMA bible study down in Morehead City. Spent a nice two hours with great friends there, and then several of us planned to ride to New Bern to the Harley dealership to help out with a children’s home fundraiser ride that they were doing.

If you aren’t familiar with my neck of the woods, the ride from Morehead City to New Bern is maybe 40 miles, mostly open state highway, passing through a couple small towns but  mostly open road. Not much traffic, not much exhaust, certainly no dog hair or mildew, very little dust. And I could not get my breathing under control. All the fresh clean air anyone could want, and I’m hyperventilating and feeling like I have my head in a plastic bag. Seriously?

So we went to the event, I sat down and kept trying. Unfortunately the only bench available to sit on was right next to the ashtray. So I was breathing secondhand smoke and trying to get my breathing under control. It didn’t help that I was pretty upset, because I really wanted to be at this particular event, held in honor of a wonderful dear man who recently passed away. Bad conditions for breath control.

So, I admitted defeat and told Bo that I needed to go back to the ER.

I won’t go into detail. Nobody wants that. Short version (no, Chan, too late for that) after two chest X-rays, a contrast C-T scan, heart monitor, Pulse Ox, extensive conversation with the respiratory therapist (who is also my Thanksgiving hostess friend), and even more blood tests …. I am really. Really. Healthy. Except it hurts to breathe.

From here – I have a consult with a cardiologist, then back to my primary doc. Then, maybe (I really really hope not) a pulmonologist, an allergist, an endocrinologist… apparently your thyroid has a lot to do with how you breathe. Who knew?

And after all of that, it is probably an odd presentation of a panic or anxiety attack. By odd, I mean – my stress level is lower now than it has ever been in my adult life – and the worst of these attacks happened when I was totally chilled out or having fun. And I’ve never had panic or anxiety attacks before, even when I was under serious stress. But still – right now that is what seems likely.

I think I have a new ninja talent. I can make medical professionals scratch their heads and shrug.

Yeah, so – I spent Tuesday night in the E.R.  No rumors of my demise, please – I’m fine. I just couldn’t breathe very well.

It was scary. I’m not gonna lie.  Saturday I started having a little trouble breathing. Nothing dramatic, just … it felt like I had run a mile or so, when I hadn’t. Sunday it got a little worse. Stop thinking about yelling at me. I know, I know, I should have gone to the E.R. immediately. I’m a dummyhead. I know.

By Monday it was pretty weird. I was having random attacks of feeling like I could NOT get enough air into my lungs, no matter what. And when I tried, it kind of hurt. Like I was fighting to expand my lungs, and an evil invisible boa constrictor was fighting to keep them contracted. Okay, you are right, I definitely should have gone to the E.R. at this point. Dummyhead. Got it. Movin’ on.

I procrastinated the whole hospital panic thing because I had a regular doctor’s appointment scheduled for Tuesday afternoon anyways. Still dumb, but at least I was not entirely eschewing medical attention. Dr. G checked me over, did an EKG (very good), checked the oxygen saturation in my blood (also very good), and told me that it was “probably” no big deal at all, but just to be 100% super-duper-on-the-safe-side sure, he:

a) wrote me a consultation to a cardiologist for a stress test
b) ordered a ton of blood tests and a chest x-ray
and
c) strongly strongly strongly recommended that I go to the E.R. so that they could definitively rule out a heart attack.

In the name of honesty, I will tell you, I walked out of his office thinking “yeah, right, heart attack. I’m 45 years old and in the best health of my life, I am NOT having a heart attack and I am NOT going to go sit in an E.R. for hours and hours for no reason!”

And then my common sense caught up with me. Drat that sense! I don’t use it very often – perhaps because sometimes it is decidedly inconvenient. I remember my grandma’s first heart attack. It was right before I joined the Navy. The only symptom she had was shortness of breath. My grandpa (purveyor of a great deal of common sense, except where his own health was concerned … hmm…) called 911. It was a very good call.

Well, I spent my 20′s and 30′s completely ignoring good advice from my doctors. In my own defense, the socialized medical care that I was receiving at that point (Navy hospital – they try, but they are really really undertrained and overbooked) was often worth ignoring. But still, I’ve been trying to do better lately. So I went to Onslow hospital’s emergency entrance. They were packed. Call me a stereotyper, but I really didn’t thing that an emergency department would be that crowded at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Sigh.

I won’t bore you with all the details. The short version of the next 12 hours of my life is – Bo drove out to be with me. They did three rounds of blood tests and a chest x-ray. Then they made me take prednisone (ack! bleck!) and two breathing treatments. I had a very bad reaction to the breathing treatments. The nurse said “you will feel sort of ‘jittery’” – yeah, apparently for me “jittery” = full-on panic attacks.

By 2 a.m. they were pretty sure that I was not having a heart attack or a blood clot.  So they released me. The official diagnosis was “reactive airway disease” which basically amounts to an allergic reaction. I am still going to follow up with the cardiologist, the chest x-ray, all of that. But chances are, the mass quantities of dog hair and the dust that the dogs bring in, coupled with the fact that my cleaning routines have been off-kilter since my last trip to Lynchburg, are to blame.

In other words, I’m not dying. I just don’t vacuum enough.