Gobble Gobble Bitch!

I played high-school football, and for that privilege, I along with my teammates yielded the last month of summer break, August, for two-a-day practices. I hated it, especially my first year; besides the sun burning everything to a crisp, and flaring up my asthma in process, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't understand any of it, for almost all of my first August. There was so much learning to do on top of running hard in the heat that the whole time my mind was an attention deficit firestorm. Couldn’t concentrate, It was like that until the last week of two-a-days, when the cheerleaders started practice.

Until then running back to the locker room was the worst part of the day. Heading back to the lockers I was completely out of breath and with each step forgot one more thing that I had just learned. I noticed one cheerleader in particular and things changed. As I’d pass with my eyes fixed on her, everything slowed down. The sun that burnt everything else, danced off her skin and sparkled in her eyes. She made my nostrils flare; I was all of a sudden awake at every nerve, totally and completely aware of everything around yet only focused on her. The pain in my muscles, the heat that threatened to set of an asthma attack, everything I learned that day, all shelved in mind, but focus was on her. That is a special type of focus and it comes in clutch.

Fast forward ten years or so to this past Wednesday, which was the day before Thanksgiving. I’d been sick for three days with a cold that was getting progressively worse. That wasn’t going to keep me from having fun. So after a half day at work; and a very enjoyable, vigorous visit from my former girlfriend I went out drinking.

I smoked the 3 last cigarettes in my pack, which also happened to be the latest three last cigarettes I intended on ever smoking. Yes smoking cigarettes with asthma is risky behavior. I thought about this as I smoked my very first cigarette, six years ago and concluded based on criteria I’ll elaborate on another day, that it was reasonable to pick up the habit for a short while. Anyone who would like to lecture me on why I was wrong can go fuck yourself. So I finished the pack drank a bit but not a lot, and moved from bar to bar with nothing but a thin wool sweater in 40 degree weather.

Brilliant.

I get home and my cold is worse and it’s affecting my asthma. I use my inhaler take some Nyquil and hit the sack. I remember clearly waking up to use my inhaler in the middle of the night twice. The first I remember using my inhaler then placing it on the nightstand. When I woke up again the second time at about 5:30am after only just going to bed a few hours earlier; with my inhaler not on the nightstand but already in my hand, it slowly dawned on me that I had been using it half-asleep quite a bit through-out the night. But this time the inhaler wasn’t hooking it and the tightness in my chest was getting worse.

-Much worse.

Get up get out of bed, slug to the bathroom, use the inhaler again. When that still doesn’t help, I get my cell and call the advice nurse that my insurance company Kaiser offers. I figured I would have to go to the urgent care center to get a quick treatment and some medicine for the cold and be on my way. Breathing was rough but if I stayed calm I thought I could handle it. But walking from my room to the stairs was rough, and as I spoke to the advice nurse things got well

- this is the point where I have to explain the breathing through an attack as bad as this was getting, is literally choking to death ever so slowly. It gets very fucking scary-

The nurse could hear this on the phone and called 911. I labored for air on the steps inside till they arrived. When the first treatment of Abuterol breathed through a bong-like pipe, didn’t work, I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t expect it to. I was working, struggling so hard I couldn’t say anything about it. I just focused on my breathing. After the 1st treatment they started another as they put me on the stretcher and into the back of the running ambulance, with the stench of the exhaust reminding me that I was not getting enough oxygen.

At this point breath control is all that matters, you can’t breathe deep, each breath taken in is shallower than the previous, and each is forced out more with more swiftness. The natural tendency is to pull in each breath as quickly as possible, and go at the attacks pace. But that’s the suckers bet, in little time you will have complete respiratory arrest. Doing that is what every facility your body holds, tells you must. How are you going to control every thing else if you don’t get those breaths in and quick. Every part of your body has a cost and they all send alarms to the brain to do something, adrenaline rushes, heart races, every function sends a loud call all at once and you can hear all of it, you know because nature tells you that you have you have to do something, and your body says do it quickly. But you have to last, you are choking to death, and the only thing that will save you at this point is a lot of chemistry. Anti-inflammatory agents to get those irritated bronchioles to chill. You have to make the choking process last as long as possible, and it is a requisite of the situation that you be aware of every alarm, but especially focused on just the right ones.

Once attached to LEDs I could see my vital stats. I felt everything but knew that it was those numbers that mattered. Two particularly, the first my oxygen level, which is measured by one of the coolest pieces of technology ever, (but that’s neither here nor there) It’s the percent of the optimal Oxygen Saturation in your bloodstream. Any thing lower than ninety is serious trouble, it’s optimal to be above 95. I was at 88 when I first looked. The second number was my heart-rate which was at 130 per minute, if you couldn’t guess that is very bad for a man technically sitting still. So obviously I needed to focus, fight the urge to breathe quickly. Fight for each breath, for every centimeter that the diaphragm can expand and relax.

Ha, relax, while being aware of the fact that too much time spent at that heart-rate made me a risk for cardiac arrest. But breathing with as much force as is required to get me from eighty-eight to at least ninety-five, takes a lot of force and energy which makes your heart beat faster. Also having these two facts at the center of focus at any given time means panic. Panic means quick shallow breaths, which means 170 pounds of would used to be me. So it was very important to focus on the numbers and the right thing to do. This was made extra tough by my EMTs who had matching overly stylized George Michael mustaches. Running back and forth going "Ok put this in your mouth" and "How is that?", and "breathe like this" and "do it like that," I swear their names were Bruce and Lance. I kid, those guys are heroes, but seriously it was distracting and tacky at the very least.

I get to the Alexandria Urgent Care unit and fight suffocation like this for a solid four hours before I get real relief. My heart rate came down and Oxygen Saturation level came up but I was still working for it. Not as hard as the previous four hours but working, I was so well enough to be left alone with the machines. A nurse came by periodically to check my status. At this point I was so tired and done I was starting to lose it, started to panic a bit.

That’s when I get my first text message.

“Gobble Gobble bitch!” – from my ace James Rensen.

Maybe it was the lack of oxygen but I thought that was funny as hell. Then I immediately couldn’t decide what was funnier, the message, or the fact that I was sitting up in a bed in the ER with a machine helping me breathe and I had a smile on my face as checked my text on my phone. Both made me laugh out loud, which for a second didn’t help my situation. But just after that I got to feeling clearer minded. After a while of more work but less struggling for my breath, I decide to send my own Gobble Gobble bitch messages, but before I do my friend Kinsey daps me up with a Gobble Gobble. Made me laugh again, now people are looking and my nurse Margaret seemed concerned. So I quietly went ahead and sent my own, Gobble Gobble, with bitch included and excluded here and there, then put the phone away. The real danger from the attack is well over, and I could relax.

At about noon, my nurse Margaret(a hotty) and my doctor Dr Gina G-somethingOrOther (a very seriously hot hotty) agreed that I was over emergency care but needed to be transferred to Inova Fairfax to be monitored. I was almost disappointed. Until my transit EMT came, a lady named Jen and a funny dude named Desmond. Desmond drove and Jen was in the back with me. Jen was sexy; I flirted with her all the way to Inova. Say what you want but my sympathy game is strong. Left with the mathematics in hand.

Pause.

Too bad she smoked.

Got to my hospital bed and tried not to get depressed, at this point I was pretty much in the clear, but I was getting bummed. The nurse Raj (not so hot but cute) said I should keep my mind on good thoughts but this was hard to do. That is until I got the replies back from the Gobble Gobble texts I had sent. Everyone answering back not knowing where I was and how much it meant really held me up. Additionally talking to the few friends who found out (I told no one, but a couple friends saw what happened) really just helped me get my mind right. It kept my attitude positive. All my friends, the ones that I texted, talked to or just otherwise know are there for me, lifted me up. And in so doing kept me from yelling at my last nurse Florence (not only totally unhot, but must have been having and very bad nursing day) this chick stuck an IV all the way through a vein. That shit hurts. Plus she found every single way there is of upsetting me, I wanted to slap her.

Finally as my family walks in with turkey leftovers, I realized that this was my Thanksgiving Day. With family there and my friends in mind I was and am honestly very thankful.

…

I just need to not smoke another one today, and the day after that, forever. I can do that, I can do anything. I really meant the cigarette at the bar to be my last, before the attack happened. I didn’t tell anyone about it, I had made all the plans, the written the lists and the only thing that really mattered was that it was the real decision. Not just the talk to get people off my back. I decided to smoke for a little while, and I did. If it was six years ago now and I had that first cigarette again, I would still smoke it, it was a reasonable decision, so long as now I stop.

So support would be nice, it’s probably necessary. Lectures are not needed and counterproductive, so if you have’em save’em or go fuck yourself.