Last night around midnight I started feeling more and more pain underneath my lowest left ribs. I took a couple extra painkillers, but the pain kept building and my breathing became very shallow and rapid, and by about 1am I couldn't take it anymore, and I had to wake up the house and we called the paramedics to come with an ambulance.
Since we knew I had a blood clot in my calf, there was the risk that it could have shot through my heart back out into my lungs (brain is not possible, I forgot how the heart worked, namely that there is a closed loop to and from the lungs before anything gets pumped out to the rest of the body). Anyway, to make a long story short I am not entirely clear what caused the pain, but they did a chest x-ray and then something called a VQ Scan. And it turns out I did have a number of small clots in my lungs, i.e. Pulmonary Embolisms. Presumably, some of those pieces were chunks from the one in my calf.
I am somewhat tired, as I didn't sleep well in Emergency, due in part to some woman with dementia (the nurse told me) screaming at random intervals. Around 3am the pain started to abate, and I feel much better now, hmm... only 12 hours later. My calf was unbearable yesterday evening, but today it is not too bad. I made it out of Emergency in time to make it to my radiation treatment across town at the cancer clinic. The home care nurse should arrive soon to inject me with my 2nd dose of Fragmin, which is, by the way, the same treatment if the clots are in my lungs, calves, or elsewhere.
