A little over a year ago, I revived the Bite commentary series, which was a thing I did back in the old DTM Webstation days and a bit further in the old DTM Blog. We’ve done eight of these in 2024 and I haven’t really had the urge to do another one until fairly recently. Not due to lack of interest, but I generally reserve the Bite commentaries for stuff that require a deep more thought and introspection than the usual fluff that I post around here. Unlike the old commentaries where I just talk about random stuff, I usually want to focus on one single thing and gather a bunch of thoughts on that.
Up until now, there hadn’t been much to bring up in that regard… but now I found something to talk about… and it’s something that I probably should have touched on a long time ago. But it is also something that I very rarely touch on around these parts because it falls outside the purview of this little web space, which is focusing on stuff that either amuse me or annoy me. For the most part, I try to keep things light here and rarely have a need to get truly serious about things.
So a couple words of warning; the obvious being that there might be some disturbing subject matter being touched on and discretion is strongly advised… but also, there’s a lot of copy and pasting being done from prior posts sort of being melded together to give you a fuller picture of my mental state because I simply don’t have the heart to retype the same words over and over again… and I simply want to focus on the healing from hereon out.
Those who have frequented this blog for the past month or so will know that I had suffered a pulmonary embolism that necessitate a trip to the hospital. A pulmonary embolism, for those who don’t know, is when blood clots prevent blood from flowing through the lungs, which results in chest pains and difficulty breathing. Sure enough, it was on a Friday afternoon when something was off, as I was climbing stairs with great effort and immediately made my way towards a bed to catch my breath. I couldn’t stand. I was breathing heavily. I didn’t feel like I was in any great pain, but I wasn’t bursting with energy, either.
At first, I thought it was an anxiety attack or heavy stress. I’m not going to lie; these past few years have been somewhat stress and not a day goes by when that stress felt like it was building up. I stayed home for the weekend, did some minor things here and there, kept busy with some stuff for this piece of business, and played with the dog… but I was still struggling to catch a breath. I still had trouble climbing stairs. I didn’t have any issues lifting some boxes here and there – boxes that were full of various electronic gizmos accumulated over the years. I just had trouble climbing steps. I tried some Tylenol and my brother offered some medication that he usually takes to calm down whenever he has his own panic attacks. It was worth a shot.
Sunday rolled around and not much had changed. I found time to do a couple quick dubs for videos and was able to put one out that night, but even those started to be challenging, as I had a hard time stringing together complete sentences without having to catch a breath every five or six words. You have no idea how badly things were because I try to reduce the breaks between words behind the scenes. By this point, I hadn’t left the house since Friday and once Monday rolled around, I pretty much had to make the call… an ambulance rolled around and brought me to the nearest hospital where I would stay for a week and a half.
Another part of the story is my recent Crohn’s flare-up. Crohn’s Disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that affects the intestines. Abdominal pains and cramps, as well as diarrhea and weight loss, are the main culprits of these disease that has no cure. I was first diagnosed with Crohn’s back in 2009 and for the better part of the past decade, the decease was largely in remission. It was also largely left unchecked due to the somewhat questionable Quebec health care system, although if I’m being fair here, my lack of follow-up also didn’t help matters, either. I bring up Crohn’s because for the past year, I’ve lost some weight… which is nice because I’ve been trying to lose some weight… but it turns out I kept losing weight to such a degree that I started to look a bit sickly.
And then my bowel movements began to be a problem – I’ve been less able to “hold it all in” as it were and not a day goes by where I’d have more than half a dozen trips to the washroom… on a good day. Sometimes, there’d be days where it seemed like half the day was spent in the john than doing anything else. I haven’t had a check-up in years and trying to get an appointment with a family doctor in Quebec is a convoluted process – the drawbacks of free health care that is controlled by the government.
So I go to a private doctor that my brother recommended and we set up a day. This thing gets worse; I’m having trouble sleeping, I’m relieving myself in the middle of the night several times – probably every half hour, if I’m being generous. The pains are getting much, much worse. I haven’t felt this miserable since I first got the Crohn’s diagnosis years ago. This is starting to be mess me up… but at least I’ve got a doctor to see. So I go to this doctor – genuinely nice dude, easy going, not the least bit intimidating like most doctors I’ve met, which makes it much easier for me to open up about all my problems. So he gives me a check out and some tests to do… and in the meantime, I’m also taking some medication to take care of the pain. He get a follow-up appointment after one of the blood tests confirm traces of Crohn’s… bare in mind, I’m still waiting on the extensive stuff like x-rays and colonoscopies that I need to do, but this guy was able to figure out my problem with a blood test.
So a week before this embolism hits, we’re trying to get in touch with a gastroenterologist to treat this Crohn’s… and that means sending a request to the health board. They refuse, because they need more tests. In the meantime, I get more medication to take care of this pain. And… for what it’s worth, the pain was going away somewhat. The stools were starting to harden. It seemed like a step in the right direction, at least.
It would have been, at least… were it not for the fact that I ended up in the hospital several days later.
So I spend a couple days in the emergency room doing some tests. I get greeted by some doctors who are not only going to take care of my blood issues, but I’m also getting a GI doctor to take charge of my Crohn’s situation. Three days in, I’m being sent into intensive care, I’m being pumped with antibiotics for most of the day, I can’t move, I’m stuck in this bed, I’m straight up panicking at this point. I’m stuck staring at the lights while this stuff is being pumped through the veins. I’ve got nothing to get my mind off things… and this phone is dying on me.
Yeah, I brought some stuff to keep me occupied during the waiting periods… a laptop to do some blog stuff, a Game Boy with Tetris… I even have a notepad to plan out future updates because fuck knows I ain’t doing anything else at this point… only to realize that “what’s the point in planning ahead? Who knows how long I’m going to be stuck here?”
By Thursday night, they move me out of the emergency room and into residency. The infusion was able to clear away most of the blood clots from my lungs, which means I’m largely out of danger. They’ve also removed me from oxygen support and I could largely breath fine for the most part… although they had to put me back on when I tried to go for a walk and… well, I’ve never been much of a patient man, but it was worth a try. Fortunately, I wasn’t on the hose for too long and was able to breath normally enough, I suppose. I could make short trips to the small washroom in the room I was in, which I was sharing with a much older gentleman who largely kept quiet unless he had family visiting.
For the next few days, I was largely in bed – taking whatever medications they were giving me and doing daily blood tests as well as routine tests for blood pleasure, heart rate, and oxygen intake. The nurses noticed my unease during these tests and tried to comfort me, tell me not to think too much about these things… and that seemed to do the trick. Heart rate was in a more “normal” level, I was breathing fine, I was even able to take walks in the hallway for a couple minutes and going longer with each passing day. Slowly but surely, I was getting back my strength.
But for the most part, I was in bed, typing away in my laptop, occasionally watching stuff on Netflix and Disney Plus… because I was recommended Andor. I got a few Tetris sessions on Game Boy, through, which one of the doctors complimented. That actually made my stay all the more worthwhile – not the getting better part, but that someone in that hospital knew good games when they saw them… oh yeah, I’d have some family and friends visit. A couple calls from other folks I know. Even the private doctor I met a couple weeks prior called to check up on me and we pretty much talk for a bit. I appreciated the call from this guy I only met a couple times, but took the time to check up on me when he heard the news of my hospitalization. That showed me that he cared. I should return the favor one of these days.
Anyway, after a few days, I’m discharged from the hospital. They give me a whole bunch of prescriptions that I need to take, including some needles to treat the Crohn’s, which the nurses demonstrated how to do. It’s pretty much a given that I’m going to be taking blood thinners and things of that nature for the rest of my life. And I’ve got follow-ups to do in the future… oh, and I’ve got to go to a specialized clinic to begin treating the Crohn’s. That’s been taken care.
So I get a ride home, I open the door, and the first thing to greet me is Maya… the dog has been under watch from other people, but the minute she sees me, she is running at warp speed. I catch her, I embrace her, and the first thing I do is go to bed and nap with the dog. Leave me the fuck alone.
I’m home for a couple weeks – a doctor’s note for the work people – but for the most part, I’m just doing minor things around the house, I’m catching up on stuff that needs catching up, I’m putting together a new dresser that I bought from IKEA to replace the old one, and I’m largely doing what I can to get better. For what it’s worth, my bowel movements are more manageable on most days, but the pains are minimal. I still get bouts of gas every so often, but I’m never in as much pain as I was the month before. I also ate more in the past couple weeks (including hospital stay despite their cuisine being… less than stellar) than I had in months prior, so my appetite had definitely improved… though I still have to watch what I eat. Not because of weight concerns, but because certain organic foods don’t react well with my bowels and I need to avoid those. Regardless, I’m not in as much distress after a meal as I was before, which is a huge step up.
And so, here we are. A month after that whole episode has taken place and I’m back to my old routine. Some tweaks here and there to take into account some things that need treating, but I’ve been doing more nowadays than I was able to before. Relating strictly to this particular part of my interests, I’ve managed to bang out a few more videos and schedule them for eventual publication – granted, most of these were almost done, but some of them needed new dubbing. Hell, I finally got the Sunday Gimmick Table series off the ground and recorded some new material for once… which will probably carry us through the summer, which is nice… nice to have another video project active that isn’t just the reviews. Hell, I’ve even managed a couple streams as well as some side material for the secondary channel, which I don’t think I’ve touched in months.
I wouldn’t call it a complete recovery. There’s still work to be done and this whole ordeal is the figurative cross that I’m going to carry for the rest of my life… and I’m widely okay with that. Am I completely at peace with my situation? Not really… there’s still a part of me that’s still upset about the whole thing. There will be days when this thing hits hard and I’m not really going to process it all that well. And of course, there’s trying to balance life issues that will make this recovery a struggle.
It’s not perfect… but I’d be hard-pressed to wave it off as “better than nothing.”
The key thing is that we’re getting somewhere. I’m getting help. I could use more help in some other areas, but we’ll get to that… maybe.
For now, I’ll just say that I feel fine.
And you know what?
I actually mean it this time.
Later.
dtm666 