I’m going to tell the story from my analysis after the fact, and hopefully with a bit of notes. Thanks to my brother in law, Brent Johnson for help editing for mistakes and clarity. Any further editing and clarity mistakes remain mine.

On Friday 6/2/2023 or Saturday 6/3/2023 I started to feel a bit run down, but no more than I’m normally used to. Sometimes I don’t sleep enough, sometimes due to my occasional anemia, and sometimes my depression acts up, so it is often hard to tell why I’m tired. So even though I didn’t feel well, it wasn’t far outside the normal variance, so I didn’t give it too much thought.

Sunday I took an extra nap, which is not that outside of the norm either.

Monday morning, 6/5/2023, I woke up tired. I worked my way through my morning routine. I fed the cats their dental chews and drank water, and got in my morning exercise, which was overly hard to finish. Went downstairs and ate breakfast, which would be the only coffee I had during the week. Since I was running a bit early, decided I could sneak in a 20-minute nap. Set my watch and closed my eyes. My alarm went off too soon, but I got up, showered, made coffee for work, and started my day with email.

It wasn’t too long until I started to feel worse. Not just tired but a little nauseated. During the first meeting of the day, I decided I was just going to take the day off, which was not a big deal since I didn’t have any other meetings, and if I was sick, why fight working through the day. So after the meeting was finished, I headed upstairs to check my temperature.

Walking from the basement to the upstairs (2 flights) is not something that normally gives me a run, but as I was heading from the main level to the upper level, I could see my vision start to close in, as if I was going to pass out.

While this has happened before, it’s not something that happens frequently or even yearly, so I thought maybe something else was going on. I took my temp; it was mildly elevated. As I started walking downstairs, I once again felt my vision start to close in, like I was going to pass out. I made it to the couch and sat down to figure out what I wanted to do.

The last time I stone cold passed out, I figured it was a one off, and it really was, but at the time my primary care provider had told me that I should’ve gone to the hospital. So I started googling my symptoms—yes, I know, a terrible thing to do—and while I had no primary symptoms of a heart attack, I did have a number of secondary symptoms. I had shortness of breath, cold sweat, nausea, and stomach discomfort.

I decided it best not to go upstairs to get socks or shoes, or go downstairs to logout of my work computer or get my headphones.

I called for emergency services. I told them that I thought I was having a mild heart attack. The emergency dispatcher got EMT services on the way to my house in short order. She told me to make sure the door was unlocked so they could get in. I got up to do that, felt very tired and almost lost it again, but I was able to unlock the door and sit back down.

I texted my wife:

I call 911
I think I am having a mild heart attack

Before my wife was able to respond, the EMTs arrived and started testing a number of things: glucose level, some other checks. They told me that it didn’t appear that I was having a heart attack and asked me what I wanted to do. Being that there were 4 or 5 or 6 men facing me, they did provide a calming air and wanted to know what I wanted to do, so I told them that even if it probably wasn’t a heart attack, something wasn’t right, and I told them that I wanted to go the hospital. They asked me which one, and I said Methodist. So they helped me get up and walked me out of the house and onto a stretcher. They locked the door behind us, loaded me into the ambulance and we were off.

They got me strapped in, setup lines for an EKG, and drew a line for fluids or other items in my left arm, which held on like a champ during the entire event.

By the time Shannon was able to text me back, she got my phone’s auto “focus” driving message while the ambulance (the second one I’ve taken in my life; the first coming after I was hit by a car on a bicycle) drove me the relatively short distance to the hospital.

They got me in and dropped me off in the Emergency Department and after a few critical checks the ED made the call to go through normal process and sent me out to the waiting room. I was able to exchange a few texts with Shannon and she headed down from her work. She met me in the children’s part of the ED waiting room. After a short wait we met with the triage nurse, and she ran the same checks—very similar to the ones the EMTs did, plus a bit more, I think, and they thought I could wait some more. I reported that my nausea was getting worse, so she gave me a barf bag, and we rolled out to wait for a room.

This is where I took action.

Okay, not really.

Shannon says I vomited and passed out. I only vaguely remember this part. I remember starting to vomit and waking up to lots people wiping me off. So I apparently vomited in the bag and on myself. There was a combination of blood and breakfast. This got me immediately roomed, my clothes taken off, and gowned. My memory is all very fuzzy for me. My clothes, keys, wallet, and phones ended up in a plastic bag. They started some fluids through the IV site the EMTs had started.

Next up, I got an x-ray to check for heart things. I got a CT scan to check for mid to lower body issues and there was some evidence of what was happening. That led to a debate on what to do next. The x-ray was normal, but the CT scan said that there was evidence of stomach bleeding, so they wanted to schedule me for an upper GI endoscopy and eventually get me to a room to wait.

I thought that perhaps I could still go home, but the nurse disabused me of the notion that I was leaving anytime soon. I told her that the language the doctor had used suggested I might be able to leave soon(ish) as he didn’t specify how long I was going to be observed, but I suppose I should’ve known.

No food. No drink. Just ice. Start texting people updates…family, boss, team lead, friends. I also slept, because I was really tired. My wife collected my devices, ran home to put my work phone on the charger, got me headphones, and brought back my CPAP machine.

To give you a sense of just how weak I was, I got physically exhausted playing a hand or two of solitaire on my phone.

Early in the morning, patient transport moved me to the endoscopy area, where I have been more than a few times. I waited in the staging room for the endoscopy room to clear up. They got me set up with normal drips and monitors since my procedure wasn’t scheduled until something like 9:13 or so. After a short wait, they brought Shannon to the waiting room and took me into the endoscopy room.

I think the good doctor was a wee bit late, but I only have a vague sense of that, as one of the drugs they put me on sort of messed with my memory. To keep me awake (ish) to avoid troubles with my sleep apnea, they did a combination of the forget this drug and local anesthesia. I remember vaguely falling asleep with the tube guard (a plastic ring to protect my teeth from it and it from my teeth) in my mouth. I also vaguely remember some issues of closing off the bleed, but again, I wouldn’t necessarily trust my perception here. I woke up back in my room and spent a good chunk of the morning and afternoon passing in and out of consciousness.

Interestingly enough, after tests I started getting buzzes on my watch notifying me of test results, often before the people on the floor (probably because I get notifications about all things me, while they only get notifications of critical things for the area). These notifications gave me results on my blood draw, or whatever, and let me know how I was doing. So I got to monitor my own numbers, which was nice. I did have to look up a thing here and there as I didn’t know what everything meant.

Generally this is where the pattern started. Blood draw for tests at 5 a.m. and noon-ish, Glucose tests around every “meal,” changes of drips at 4 hours or 12 hours, and temp, blood pressure, and oxygen level checks four times a day.

Eventually they let me start to “eat” very simple foods that wouldn’t stress the stomach or leave much residue. This included a bunch of things I wouldn’t normally eat (due to the sugar content). I ate what I could tolerate, which wasn’t that much, which, as I think about it, probably wasn’t great for my body’s blood generation, though I was still on a drip to keep me hydrated..

As we were waiting for the next thing, Shannon made the best joke of the stay, “My goal for discharge is to become a magnetic whiteboard eraser.” Though after mentioning this to the nurse, I did get discharge goals.

This is where I learned that my body retains things in my gastrointestinal tract and likes to hide things from time to time. So even though I was no longer bleeding from my stomach (as I learned from my second endoscopy), the end stage of my gastrointestinal tract likes to hide things. So this could be due to the amount of things ate (not much), to just general pockets. I know I have diverticula, so i suppose residue could have hidden in there.

My 5 a.m. test on Thursday (my third 5 a.m. test of the week) for hemoglobin dropped from the previous day, so they were concerned that I might still be bleeding. This caused a bit of confusion and conflicting orders between the GI doctor and Internal Medicine doctor. One wanted to get me prepped for a scope, while the other thought that if I ate “breakfast,” they could reserve a spot for tomorrow.

But evidence of blood, which would turn out to be evidence of my less-than-speedy GI tract, showed up, so I ended up getting another endoscopy early Thursday afternoon.

Between the evidence and the procedure, they confirmed my blood type (again) and gave me another unit of blood, and while I might have gotten some blood during my first endoscopy, this time I actually got to see them do it. Lots of physical process, scanning, double checking, taking my blood ID tag sticker to tie it to the bag of blood, authenticating with a password on my medical record to record it happening, signatures—it seemed like a lot, but when you think about how much of a shock to the system a bad blood transfusion can be and how precious blood is, it starts to make sense. I did ask if I got a discount since I was a 5+ gallon donor of blood, and that got a laugh.

The second endoscopy confirmed that the first endoscopy was done well enough, and I probably wasn’t bleeding. So they updated me to a low-fiber diet. I ordered dinner: turkey with gravy on white bread, with green beans, a biscuit, and a banana. Per my text to my family: “the turkey is dry, the gravy is meh, but I mean, still good” and “beats cream of wheat.”

Friday morning, after my 5 a.m. hemoglobin test jumped 1.2 g/L to 8.2 g/L (still low), they removed the last drip I was on. That brought about a lot of excitement. After discussions between Shannon and I and both doctors, and then more discussions that the doctors had among themselves, they decided that if my hemoglobin level went up again, I’d get to escape. The test was scheduled for 4 p.m. It turns out the person doing the blood tests had a couple of issues, and didn’t get to us until after a STAT was placed on the order. As soon as I got the result that it went up another 0.2 g/L, we started packing up.

The nurse mentioned that almost immediately after the result came in, the discharge orders came in. We cleaned up the room, packed my things, and just waited for the paperwork to go through. My two lines got taken out and we were headed home at 5:18 (okay, maybe 5:19) on Friday evening—4.5 days after the ordeal began.

We picked up some food on the way home, and I got to say hello to our cats for the first time all week.