allergies | Elbrecht's Corpuscle

Nine Lives… part II

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Elbrecht

[Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape with the fall of Icarus”, ca. 1558]

In case you missed it: Nine Lives… part I

To recap Lives 1-4…

#1: Pneumonia-induced bubble boy survives on Atari and Jell-O

#2: Asthma and Animal Allergies combine to nearly suffocate my ascendance into teenagerhood.

#3: Tracheitis can nearly kill me, but it can’t keep me from dancing with a Debutante.

#4: Semi-Survivor… German-formulated Panzer tank (aka The Ghetto Sled) prevents death on the highway.

Life #5: Ended at age 22. After surviving four years at an alcohol-soaked university and burning through two lives, I spent the summer between undergrad and grad school living in Cincinnati. Due to my desire to avoid returning to Lexington for three months, my buddy Gib had offered a bed in his folk’s place as a way-station between earning my Bachelor’s degree and an attempt to go into even Higher Education.

After cozily sleeping til 11AM, one morning I awoke to find that I was having trouble breathing, but this was unlike anything I had experienced in my previous four lives. I quickly ran through my routine of airway-saving measures, but nothing alleviated the difficulty I was having.

Alarmed by my obvious distress, Gib and I hopped in his car and went to the nearest Urgent Treatment Center. The young doctor manning the office took one look into my mouth and his jaw hit the floor. With his pupils dilated to the size of nickels, he immediately insisted I rush to the hospital; he’d never seen such a large tonsil.

I tried to calm him down as he attempted to convince me of my imminent doom. He provided a pen-light and mirror; I could then see my left tonsil was so swollen that the back of my throat was barely visible. I continued my insistence for not wanting to rush to the hospital. He looked at me incredulously. But I was so relieved it was only a pulsating tonsil, not a swollen trachea, bronchi, or alveoli causing his (and my) concern.

He eventually relented and gave me some antibiotics and an appointment to see an Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) doctor in two days. And a stern warning that if I began feeling worse that I HAD to go to the hospital.

On Monday I went to my appointment, where the nurse echoed the young doc’s assessment: I had the grand-daddy of pulsating tonsils. The ENT doctor entered the room, asked me to hold on to the arms of the chair like my life depended on it, and grabbed a needle which he plunged into the swollen mass.

He retracted it, looked puzzled, and admitted he had expected it to burst. But only a small trickle of blood had exited. Disappointed, he gave me a different antibiotic prescription, some pain medication (Codeine), insisted that I go on a liquid diet, and asked for me to return the following Monday. And also provided a stern warning that if I began feeling worse that I HAD to go to the hospital.

Gib and I stopped by the pharmacy and filled my prescriptions on the way home. The Codeine knocked me out cold. So much so that I spent the next week sleeping on the couch in the TV room. In the same clothes. Every day. I couldn’t even make it up the stairs to the bed because I was so drowsy. Our friends would come over and ask if I was dying.

Each day, Gib would run out to Mickey D’s and grab me a vanilla milk shake. It doubled as a vehicle for my antibiotics and Codeine, as well as a cooling force against the warm pulsations. After quietly sucking it down, I would roll back over, and go back to being nearly comatose.

When the following Monday finally arrived, Gib’s mom offered to take me back to the ENT. With my appointment at 11AM, I rolled off the couch at 10AM, stumbled upstairs, took a quick shower and changed my clothes. As I clumsily made my way downstairs in a Codeine-induced haze, I felt like I needed to cough.

So I reared back and tried to clear my throat as if a hair ball was waiting to be expelled.

The result was a barely audible pop accompanied with a release of pressure; I could only assume it was my tonsil exploding. Almost instantaneously, I could feel the now-former contents of my left tonsil pouring down my throat.

The feeling induced my gag reflex, so I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a little Dixie cup, and promptly filled it with the pus-blood mixture from my tonsil.

The Mum (aka Gib’s mom) still insisted she take me to the ENT to make sure I wasn’t in need of some sort of surgery and stitches from the explosion. Thankfully, I wasn’t. But the doc still poked another needle into the tonsil, hoping for a secondary explosion, which did not occur. Apparently my hack-cough had expelled everything into my stomach or the Dixie cup.

[Note: Obviously, this End of Life wasn’t as traumatic as #4… however, I did have left over Codeine from this experience, which I subsequently used one night about a year later while drinking beers with a girl I was “dating” named Jasmine. My body could not handle this volatile mixture. Medically, no one’s body should be able to handle this volatile mixture. It felt as if every orifice of my body needed to expel whatever contents were within. Based on the sounds coming from my bathroom, my roommates could have only assumed I had contracted Ebola and would need to be scraped from the tile floor in the morning… Life Lesson Learned: Never, Ever, mix alcohol and prescription pain meds… Or date women whose name will automatically make your friends think you met her at a strip club.]

[P.S. Note: Remember, say NO to drugs. And women with stripper names.]

Life #6: Ended at age 28. While in the midst of applying to medical school, my girlfriend of 3.5 years, who doubled as my best friend, decided that spending the rest of her life with me wasn’t going to make her happy any more. It was completely unexpected and obliterated the limits of my coping mechanisms. The aftermath was not pretty. I spent three months living by myself in the duplex we had shared, leaving incredibly early in the morning and returning only to sleep. The time between was filled with work, exercise, and wanderlust, leading me into random neighborhoods of Boston.

However, the break-up itself wasn’t the reason Life #6 ended… though it did represent the meta-physical end to a life I expected to lead. More so, Life #6 ended because the person who emerged out of the depths of those three months was a new “me”.

Those three months, which were book-ended by her departure and my younger brother moved in, were best characterized as “Hepatitis and He-Man.” With my life suddenly devoid of its biggest asset, I would spend Friday and Saturday nights indulging in the company provided by my friends or the Enormous Room in Cambridge. These shenanigans would be off-set by the legendary-in-my-own-mind workout sessions I found myself completing at the gym on the subsequent day.

On a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I would often slowly begin to rouse myself, eat a light meal, and pack my bag for the gym. When I got there, I was a beast. All of the carbohydrates (and pain) I’d ingested overnight were begging to be burned away. I obliged by conducting my own personal indoor triathlons (torture sessions) over the next several hours. I had never so effortlessly pushed my body to its limits. Using the elliptical machine as my run, a stationary bike, and swimming laps in the pool, I escaped from my world of heartache and hepatitis. The endorphins I felt kept my mind at ease. The fatigue I usually felt after an hour of exercise never arrived. The sore muscles were completely absent. The willingness to quit had evaporated.

Things that had previously limited me, in mind, body, and spirit were no longer present. And I felt like I could accomplish anything I put in front of myself. This belief and the limits I overcame have served me well in the subsequent years.

And from that experience, emerged Life #7… which thankfully, by my count, I’m still on. It’s been good so far, filled with medical knowledge and clinical skills, amazing adventures in the Caribbean… Miami… Boston… Chicago… nYc… Columbus, countless new friends, and a life full of opportunity.

But I must say, in the future it would be nice to avoid any future brushes with absent airway induced death. And vehicular assaults. And soul-crushing misadventures of the heart.

Especially since I only have two lives left after this one.

Nine Lives… part I

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Elbrecht

[August 21, 2001]

On Friday, June 13, 1980, at 9:11PM, in Wichita, KS, I was born. It was 110 degrees. And my parents misspelled my name. The fact that I’m still alive should be surprising to anyone who believes in bad luck. Or knows my parents.

Being born on a Friday the 13th is supposed to elicit some sort of black magic voodoo. Maybe it’s black magic voodoo that kept me kicking inside my mom for an extra two days past my due date of June 11; maybe if I’d been born any earlier or a few hours later, I would have succumbed to one of the several biological insults I’ve encountered in my 33, almost 34 years of life.

Of the members of the animal kingdom, cats are typically most associated with luck. Bad luck, that is. But in order to offset their inherent bad luck, the cosmos also blessed them with Nine Lives. I’m sure one of these lives is automatically deducted for having to survive in our world and the dangers we cause. This basically leaves them with eight lives to negotiate their own existence.

The bad luck I was blessed/cursed to be born with would make me a logical choice to be a kindred spirit to cats. But I’m allergic to cats. Cats love to cause me allergic reactions. Kindred spirits we are not.

This being the case, I’m more of a dog person. I grew up with them in my house my entire life. But guess what, I’m even more allergic to their dander than cats’. Yet, it didn’t dissuade my parents from keeping them around. A lot of them.

So like the cats who dabble in bad luck, I’ve channeled my dark voodoo magic luck into Nine Lives. Let’s see where I stand…

Life #1: Ended at age 4. Frolicking in Lake Michigan while pretending to be a pelican is a good way to have a bunch of microbe-infested lake water go pouring into your lungs. The next morning when I awoke with a death-rattle wheeze and sky-high temp, my parents rushed me to the nearest hospital. I spent 5 days living in a plastic bubble (yep, I was a bubble boy) while the doctors and nurses pumped me with antibiotics to crush the pneumonia that was trying to suffocate me.

During my hospital stay, I developed a disdain for Jell-O (it was the only thing I was allowed to eat), which grew exponentially by the day and has been maintained throughout my life. Thankfully though, this developing hatred was off-set by my introduction to video games, which I was allowed to play all day long.

Atari. Centipede. Bye Bye Pneumonia!

Life #2: Ended at age 12… when I had my last major asthma attack. Right around this time, I became sentient enough to realize the main cause of the nearly dozen Emergency Room visits and two hospitalizations I had sustained over the last 7 years were the dogs living in my house. I was constantly grabbing my inhaler, trying to breathe over the dander infesting every square inch of our home. My parents knew I was allergic, as I’d received numerous shots, been put on oral corticosteroids causing me to gain 20 pounds of fat in two months, and was constantly having fits of eczema, which left me physically scarred to this day. [I dare you to take a bath in betadine with open wounds all over your body… I was screaming for days.]

Before this time, I simply wasn’t smart enough to realize why every time I played with my dog I started itching, wheezing, and sneezing. Once I had this ah-ha! moment, I tried to be more cautious… but that was pretty much like running through a cabbage patch full of land mines when you have five dogs at home and one of them sleeps on your bed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT4-UcTkc-A

[Note: I’m also allergic to horses. Maybe worse than dogs. Ok, definitely worse than dogs. But my parents made me go to horse shows and be around horses my entire childhood too. I’ve concluded they were trying to thin the herd in our household. Well guess what… survival of the fittest! All of those animals are d-e-a-d. And I’m not.]

Life #3: Ended at age 20. I was on Christmas break from college and only two days away from attending the Debutante Ball with my good friend Katherine. I was in Lexington, staying the night at her parents home, when I started feeling like my allergies and asthma were acting up. I tried all of my normal tricks to make myself feel better: anti-histamines, albuterol inhaler, hot shower, fresh air, etc, etc. But I still felt my difficulty breathing increasing. I didn’t dare try to sleep. I simply sat up in bed, trying to gulp in air when possible, puffing on my inhaler every hour, but to no avail.

Eventually, her father woke up the next morning at 5AM and between gasped breaths, I asked if he would mind taking me to the hospital. Obviously, he obliged.

In the Emergency Department, the doctor diagnosed me with… tracheitis… solving the mystery of why my inhaler and other tricks weren’t working. He pumped me full of antibiotics and inhaled steroids to decrease the swelling and discharged me by 11AM. I rested the entire day and made the Debutante Ball with no one the wiser.

[Note: So by age 20, I’d had the alveoli (the little sacks at the furthest reaches of your lungs) get infected and inflamed causing my pneumonia. I’d had my bronchi (the muscular extensions branching off into the individual lungs) get consistently irritated from allergic insults and cause my horrific childhood asthma. And now my trachea (the air pipe that leads from your throat to the bronchi) get infected somehow and slowly close off my air passage… Friday. The 13th. In. Effect.]

Life #4: Ended at age 21. Only nine months after surviving some bizarro bacterial infection that threatened to cut off my oxygen supply, I was driving east on US-70 outside of Kansas City when I was struck by a semi-tractor trailer traveling 35 mph. Luckily for my brother and I, we were encased in my 1983 Mercedes-Benz station wagon. [See image at the beginning of this post.]

We had left KC only 45 minutes earlier while a slow, misty rain was falling on the highway. My brother and I were heading back to Ohio, where we were about to begin school again after spending some time in Kansas visiting friends. He was sleeping in the passenger seat, his head resting on the frame of the door.

As I drove along the two-lane highway, I could see traffic was stopped ahead of us and the right lane was clear because an ambulance had maneuvered its way to a small collision 300 yards in the distance. As I came to a stop in the left-hand lane, with the right lane completely devoid of any traffic, and with a red truck stopped only a half car-length ahead of us, I ever-so-slightly turned my steering wheel to the right… I reflexively peeked up into the rear-view mirror… only to see the grille of a semi smash into the back of my pseudo German tank. All hell broke loose.

When all was said and done, my brother and I were alive… But the scene was chaos. The Ghetto Sled (as I affectionately termed my car) had jettisoned into the right-hand lane, barely clipping the red truck in front of us (rather than being smashed accordian-like into the bed of the truck). The front passenger-side of TGS smashed into the retaining wall of the overpass, spilling transmission fluid all over the road. (Yes, we were on an overpass… from which we could have flipped over and onto the traffic below.)

My brother, asleep at the time of the accident, had violently smashed his head into the frame of the car, causing him to seize, and me to believe, that he had died. (He had to be removed from TGS with the jaws-of-life and air-lifted to the nearest hospital.)

I instinctively turned off the car, swung open the driver’s side door, and climbed out. My body was completely numb, but I simultaneously felt as if every bone in my body was broken as I stumbled towards the driver of the red pickup. I then looked at what was left of the TGS, my brother seizing in the passenger’s seat, and the smashed grill of the semi behind us.

Thankfully, the EMS responders who were tending to the minor fender-bender ahead of us had seen the entire accident unfold. They threw the ambulance in reverse, and due to a clear right-hand lane, were tending to my brother in a matter of seconds.

Somehow, I came away from the whole scene with only minor lower back musculoskeletal damage and some wicked whiplash. My brother spent the night in the hospital, was found to have no grave cranial or neurological damage, and was released the next day.

[Note: When we went to the junk yard to collect whatever was left of our belongings from TGS, I recovered a few meaningful mementos. But most importantly, in the pocket behind the driver’s seat was a picture of my second cousin Eddie, a dashing and handsome man, dressed in a tuxedo while flashing his million dollar smile. He had been killed at 31 years old when a semi-tractor trailer operated by an intoxicated driver barreled through a turn and demolished his car. I don’t believe in God. But I believe in Eddie.]

If you think a semi is my last brush with death… you ain’t heard nothing yet… If you’re feeling lucky, come back for Nine Lives… part II.