me and my pulmonary embolism

Another long delay since my last post, but I promise my excuse is even better than the last one; I spent almost a week in the hospital enjoying the morphine drip after the pneumothorax on my lung, or the cracked bone in my hand, formed a clot that went to my lung and got infected. Franciska cheerily informed me on the phone the other night that 1 in 10 pulmonary embolisms are fatal; I'm sure the statistic is misleading but I take some dark pleasure in proclaiming myself the latest winner of Pulmonary Embolism Roulette.

While I was laid up I refused to think about the fact that an embolism killed my dad in 1998; he was 75 years old, not in great health, and I am not his biological offspring but none of that seemed to help. Mortality has a way of getting back in your face, in the hospital.


In an odd bit of timing, my mom's brother, who drove down from Ontario, showed up for a surprise visit the very day I was admitted. Uncle Harold stayed in Dartmouth for the whole week. He drove Mom to visit me in my room each day, and brought me home on his last day here. Mom and Harold have lost two sisters to cancer, Harold's wife Marian is in the last stages of Alzheimer's, and neither one of them is in the greatest of health, so mortality is very much on Harold's mind these days. His plan after Halifax was to head up to Moncton for a week to visit the old stomping grounds; I got the strong impression that he is thinking of it as one last visit home.

From my perch on my hospital bed I wasn't feeling particularly insulated from all of that. If there's one thing I got reminded of this month, it's that there's not a one of us that's indestructible.