How a clot almost killed me-The Accident #2
Just as my left eye was starting to open letting me see little bits of where I was I had a massive pulmonary embolism that made me go into cardiac arrest for 8 minutes, then a minute and a half. When I went to the dental clinic at Bellevue as an outpatient the chief resident told someone there about the PE. I took it in but I still didn’t realize the severity. The next time I went in, the main OMFS surgeon was there and he looked at me and said “you shouldn’t be here”. Again the impact of the statement didn’t really hit me until later. He wasn’t commenting on it being unfair me being in the clinic. He was talking about here in this universe.
When my plastic surgeon came on board for the second surgery he said to the OMFS surgeon that he had heard about the PE but not the facial surgery. I thought that my face would have been a more interesting story.
In a statement for the lawsuit my trauma surgeon said that I was one of the biggest saves of his life. He was there when I came in: BIBA (brought in by ambulance) and insisted on a CT scan when I was showing signs of a PE/signs of a panic attack twelve days later. If the scan hadn’t been done they wouldn’t have seen the clot and they wouldn’t have been right there trying to bust the clot from the inside with a groin catheter. My heart would have stopped and it would have been a surprise. It was the middle of the day on a non-holiday weekday in a teaching hospital. If this had happened “out of hours” I might not have made it either. Mortality rates from PE are higher on the weekend and at nights.
My memory of the day is that I was in my bed in the ICU and they were trying to put a groin catheter in and I didn’t know why it was so tricky and uncomfortable. I was used to a catheter for urine. Then I think my breathing started to go funny and maybe my blood pressure dropped. All those vital signs were on monitors. I must have flatlined and then they closed the whole ward down and called a Code Blue. This meant doctors and residents came from everywhere. I was told there were about 60 people there. I was also told that the person who helped the most was one of the OMFS residents who had been there when I was brought in and I think he was there for the first reconstructive surgery but I’m not sure. On one of my outpatient visits he was taking some pictures of me to show the chief surgeon and I asked whether he thought I’d be able to do handstands again. I don’t think he gave me an answer. I was told he was doing compressions for a long time. I don’t know if they used a defibrillator but I have small scars on my chest that might be from that.
After getting my heart back I went into cardiac arrest a second time. That time it was a minute and a half.
I remember being on a gurney being taken to surgery and one of the doctors had a manual resuscitator helping me breathe. I remember saying to myself that I didn’t want to die. I would have been taken in then to have open heart surgery to remove the clot. I was then in the cardiac recovery room. It was still touch and go but I made it through that night and all the ones since. My dad saw one of my trauma surgeons in the elevator the next day and he said that it wasn’t just medicine that saved me. I was also called a miracle by one of the cardiac nurses on an outpatient visit.
It was only recently that I looked up clots and I saw pictures of these deformed things. I’d imagined it as a something smooth, like a marble. It made its way into my lungs from the pelvic fractures most likely. Looking at the shape of them in real life you’d think something would have stopped it on its way up. I don’t want to link to images of clots, you can do that on your own. They look like intestines.
I went to see my OMFS surgeon before the second reconstructive surgery and I mentioned something about wanting my trauma surgeon being around. My OMFS surgeon said that if I hadn’t been at Bellevue I wouldn’t have made it. I know this. If the paramedics had taken me to Brooklyn Hospital instead of Bellevue I probably wouldn’t be here. I was in a taxi coming back from Bellevue one time and I was talking about how they saved me and the driver said they should advertise that. Before I went to Bellevue I knew it as a psychiatric hospital. In books “going to Bellevue” was often synonymous with needing psychiatric care. I told the taxi driver it’s a hospital for when you can’t make a conscious choice. In the ambulance I was worried about not making it to a dance show in time; I didn’t really know what had happened. I’d asked the paramedics the time. It was three months later I made it out of hospital/rehab.
