Your Health is Your #1 Business; Don't Take it for Granted

This is somewhat of a reprint of content I posted to my personal Facebook, but I felt it was important enough to warrant being put here too. The short version is don't take your health for granted, and be grateful for every day you have. Your life can change in an instant, and sometimes does just that. It did for me.

A little background first.

I like many of us was off and on sick for weeks in November and early December. We locally here call it "the crud" but it's a lingering cough with general malaise that was mostly treated with over the counter remedies like NyQuil/DayQuil. I had been managing it for some time, making go/no go calls for trips and events based on how I felt.

The second week of December I was scheduled to take my last trip of the year to New York and Toronto, and I felt well enough on that Monday night that I made the call to make the trip because it was important. That's when things started to deteriorate.

Tuesday was just fine. I had dinner with some friends in New York and then went back to my hotel to prepare for my speaking engagement the following day. When I awoke Wednesday I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. I called off the morning meetings and said I would just do the speaking engagement so I could go back to bed right afterward. I did that, and retreated to my hotel. Over the course of the next 24 hours things would go from bad to worse, to really bad, to really worse.

I flew home on Thursday the 15th, propped up with cold medicine, and felt mostly okay on the flight to Houston. Then things started to accelerate and go downhill. My resting pulse rate started to rise, I could feel myself getting worse. I told myself that if I could just get home, I could take a hot shower and then go to bed.

Thankfully, that is not what occurred.

Once we got to cruising altitude I could tell that I was starting to have a problem which was exposed by the cabin pressurization. Knowing we were not far from Corpus Christi I toughed it out with visions of hot showers in my head. It got better once we landed, but while waiting for my bag everything fell apart. My pulse hit 120. I was having chest pains. I was short of breath. In short, I thought I was having a heart attack.

I made the call that it would be faster for me to drive to the hospital (I know, I know) and did so. They rushed me in and started a workup on me and rapidly eliminated my heart as being the cause, rather it was responding to something else.

I had pneumonia and had gone septic. The doctor said he put my chances at 50/50 at that point, and 3 in 10 people admitted to the hospital for pneumonia don't make it.

I spent Thursday night/Friday morning in an ER room. I was in excruciating pain, and I had lost all of the lung capacity in my right lung. My fever hit 104.5 and I was experiencing massive chills, which in turn caused enormous amounts of pain that eventually required morphine. As the early morning progressed I became one of many folks in the ER that required serious care. Since I was stable I was mostly left alone. However, the problem was that I had rolled over onto my IV tube which blocked the morphine. As a result I spent several hours alone and I'm not embarrassed to say screaming and crying from the pain in my chest every time I had to breathe.

Over the course of the early morning I stabilized and they admitted me to the hospital. Later the Doctor told me that had I not gone to the ER when I did and instead had gone home, I would have likely died before Christmas.

The next few days the pneumonia raged, my resting heart rate continued to rise, a blood infection was found, and the lung infection was not responding to the increasing grade of antibiotics I was being given. I had a bronchoscopy which removed samples of my infection in my lungs to culture and try to determine how best to fix it. Those cultures took several days and ultimately proved inconclusive because I had been on antibiotics for 16 hours by the time they were sampled.

That Monday was another setback when I had a coughing fit and my heart reached 208 BPM (my max based on my age is about 170) before I was "full code" and the crash cart came in. I have no memory of this but I read in my chart that my heart stopped for 83 seconds.

In short, I died.

Thanks to the skilled nurses they clawed me back and stabilized me. I was pumped full of blood thinners, anti-clot medicine (which is required to be injected into your belly. They call it the "belly bruiser" and mine looks like I was repeatedly kicked in the gut with a steel-toed boot), and even greater antibiotics which came in giant needles and felt like lava being injected into me. This was bad.

After much investigation it was determined that my heart had gone into an arrhythmia and one quadrant was beating at over 150 BPM while the other ventricles would struggle to keep up. Treating the heart immediately brought things down into a more normal range and we thought things would improve. However, in spite of all this and carpet bombing of antibiotics the infection still was not abating and my white cell count was still very high. We were making some progress, but it was a two steps forward... one step back kind of thing. After much discussion with many doctors it was hypothesized that perhaps there was fluid pooling in the space between my lung and my side. A quick ultrasound showed that to be the case and I was quickly "under the needle" again where they drained a significant amount of fluid from me (I'll spare you the details there, but yuck). This offered some immediate relief and allowed some of the blocked lung to open up into the new real estate.

Over the course of the next few days it was a game of whack-a-mole. Get heart rate down, hit infection, heart rate increases, infection grew.

Then something amazing happened. My heart converted, on its own, back to a normal sinus rhythm. EKGs and ultrasounds were done, all showed the same thing. My heart had returned to normal, and there was no damage to my heart from the event nor any other rapid heartbeats. The cardiologist said that he'd seen that happen twice before in his career, and that I was VERY lucky. They put me on control medication as a precaution and asked me to visit again in a few weeks.

In addition to this my infection started to decrease. My white cell count decreased steadily, and the decision was made to send me home to convalesce on Christmas Eve.

This is nothing short of a miracle. Period. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I should be dead right now from about 3 different directions, yet I am not. My friends and church family and people I don't even know from all over the country rallied around me and prayed over and for me. They prayed for the doctors and nurses caring for me. They comforted me (and my wife Erika) and at one point where there in minutes when the call was made. It was amazing. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

I'm not 100% well by a long shot, and to get back there will likely take weeks if not months. I'm two weeks out of the hospital now and walking more than a few hundred yards is still a challenge. However, I'm oceans better than I was a few weeks ago and most importantly I am here to tell the tale.

So, let me be a warning to you. If you feel lousy for more than a few days, get checked out. When it says on the NyQuil box "do not use for more than 7 days without talking to your doctor", heed that warning. Take care of yourself, and don't ever take your health for granted. It can be taken away in a heartbeat.

And know that God is good, and prayer works. My writing this is proof of that.