An April To Forget

Whew! Can anything else go wrong? I suspect not!

And before I go on, let me include a spoiler right here in case you're unduly concerned for my wellbeing. Everything's fine. Ok? Just fine.

So let me tell you why everything needs to be bloody fine, because this April has been one I'd rather forget.

First, I rolled over on my ankle. Sprained it and got to limp around for a few days eliciting some small degree of sympathy from those who crossed my path. As sprains go, it was pretty bad, but nothing compared to the time I did the same ankle on a cobblestoned street in Istanbul.

The ankle took about four days to shrink to tennis ball size, and as long as I didn't try running or skate boarding, I was fine.

And then, a week later, I rolled on it again. Crack. Down I went, leaving a near perfect face print in the mud. That snapping sound was so loud that a dozen or so people in the dog park came running over, certain I'd broken something. I was sure I'd broken something too, and it took all musterable strength to load Zac back into the car and drive the few blocks to home.

I cried. Really. I know it's not a manly thing to do, but the pain was pretty fierce, though I do suspect the tears were, in part, out of frustration for having done something that stupid again.

Dr J and I talked about rushing off to hospital but with the state of the public health system in Sydney, we decided that sitting in Emergency for 12 to 14 hours just for the privilege of being seen by an overworked, tired first year intern probably wasn't a productive use of time. It's just lucky I had a hidden stash of Panadeine Forte to get me through the night.

The next day, the ankle was grapefruit sized, but I could walk on it so I figured it probably wasn't broken after all. It still warranted a trip to the local GP though and that's where the real problems started.

It had been two years since I'd seen my doctor. She'd actually wondered if I'd perhaps died or moved away. Whatever. All that meant was that while my ankle was rather large and warranted immediate X-Rays, she was more concerned about my off the cuff "short of breath with chest pains" answer to her otherwise innocent "how have you been feeling?" question.

We'll get back to those chest pains later. In the mean time, the X-Rays were fine, but she was concerned I'd snapped a tendon so she ordered an MRI and casually declared that my snow boarding and mountain climbing careers were over. I'm picking up the MRI results on Monday, and I'll let you know. It's probably academic. "If you were an elite athlete, then we might consider surgery. You're not, so we won't." Thanks doc, for reminding me once again of my athletic inadequacy.

As it turned out, the MRI and the appointment with the cardiologist were on the same day. I've been seeing the heart guy for 20+ years to keep an eye on a dicky aortic valve, and the last time I saw him, he basically said "Go away. I don't want to see you for another 5 years." If that hadn't been good news, I suppose I might have taken it a little personally.

That he remembered me was nice, and that he remembered that I was seeing him two years too soon was nice too, I think. He was unamused that my heart appeared to have deteriorated, which didn't make my day. He ordered an echo cardiogram, basically an ultrasound of the heart valve, where the main thing they look for is the speed at which the blood is squirted out of the left ventrical. This, I'm told, is important because in a stunning design flaw, if the blood comes out of the heart too fast, it misses the little inlet arteries that actually take it into the heart muscle, which makes the heart want to beat harder, which means the jet of blood is moving faster, which means even less of it gets into the heart. Eventually, the hearts just throws itself over on its side and says "screw this, I'm outa here", and you die.

Which is not to say I died, or even came close to dying, mainly because the ultrasound showed the jet at about half the speed it would have needed to be for me to be dead (though, come to think of it, if I was dead, then presumeably, there would be no speed at all).

The raw number was 38. Don't worry about what 38 means. Just know that in the last fifteen years, it's deteriorated by just 8. In normal people, it would have deteriorated by about 30 in the same timeframe. Hooyah! Score 1 for Chester.

That didn't deter the cardiologist though. "Chest pains and shortness of breath. Damn. I was sure the valve would explain that... I think we'd better do an angiogram next week."

Oh. Ok then. Next week it is.

So it's Thursday. I'm scheduled for a day in hospital next week with a potentially clapped out heart, and I get a phone call from my bro'.

"Mate, I just got a cryptic call from Dad's travel agent. He's been taken off the cruise ship and rushed to hospital in China with internal bleeding. I don't even know where in China."

There's nothing like a crisis to focus someone with ADD. I guess the imperative speeds up one part of the brain so it matches the speed of the other part, and we ADD people become super efficient. It took ten minutes to track Dad down to a little hospital in Tianjin, and another ten to get enough of the story from his travel insurance company to know that he was being looked after. Unfortunately, dear Mother hadn't signed the release forms before they left, so the good people at the insurance company couldn't actually talk to me about what was wrong with Dad, they could just tell me where he was.

Think it can't get much worse? You're wrong.

On Sunday night, I felt a familiar twinge behind my right ear. I won't go into the graphic details... suffice to say that every six months, I get swelling inside my ear and it's excruciatingly painful. I knew that within 36 hours, I would be in agony, and doped to the gills on the aforementioned Panadeine Forte, unable to sleep and barely able to function at all.

Thirty six hours would make it Tuesday... the very day I'm scheduled for the angiogram.

So there I was, off my face on very nice drugs, and about to have a test that's supposed to tell me how my heart's going, and whether I'm going to need heart surgery. I still can't walk properly, Dad's bleeding to death in a foreign hospital where no-one speaks English, and my ear is agonising. Really agonising. Think of how it would feel to have someone drive a really big flat blade screwdriver into your ear drum and twist. That's not it. It's worse than that.

This was not fun people. I didn't want to tell the family about the angiogram because no-one needed the additional worry, and I was reasonably sure it would be fine. Unfortunately, this meant bro' kept calling to co-ordinate Dad's evacuation from Beijing (he moved to a shiny new hospital there on that same day). Seriously, if I'd been able to take the phone into the operating room, it wouldn't have stopped ringing.

So here's the wash up...

Dad's problem ws a bleeding ulcer... bad, but not nearly as serious as first thought. He and Mum are due home today thanks to the very fine work of his insurance company.

The ankle's only a bit swollen now. I'll pick up the MRI results on Monday, and I suspect there's not much I can do about it other than being more careful. I have cancelled the Extreme Adventure Sports Vacation scheduled for August, and have promised to go somewhere a little quieter.

The ear has a way of fixing itself that I won't describe in case you're eating.

And the heart? Perfect. To use the cardiologist's own words... "surprised as I am to have to say it, especially given your self confessed poor diet of deep fried take-away, and your flagrant disregard of your cholesterol levels, your heart is more like the heart of a 30 year old than a fifty year old."

So that's been my April.

I do suspect things will improve... the sun came out for the first time in 17 days and the superstitious remnant left in my more evolved brain thinks this might be a sign.