Serious medical issue will limit
my writing here for six months

By David McElroy · April 4, 2016

Eight days ago, I went to an emergency room because I was having trouble breathing. Tests determined I have bilateral pulmonary emboli, which is just a fancy way of saying I have multiple blood clots in both lungs. I’ve been told that such clots kill 30 percent of those who have them before they’re even diagnosed.

I was very lucky.

I haven’t posted any new articles here in almost three months. I’ve known something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. I’ve had extreme fatigue, lack of energy and a general feeling of full-time exhaustion. I woke up exhausted each morning. Just walking my dog a quarter of a mile would drain me. I’ve been doing the minimum I had to do to survive — and then simply collapsing at home.

I knew I’d gained weight lately from stress-eating, so I attributed the physical symptoms to weight gain and the mental lethargy to depression. But I now know that another problem was building, although it’s impossible to say when it started.

Blood clots in the lungs make it difficult for the body to absorb oxygen from the air we breath. The blood vessels in our lungs normally take oxygen from the lungs and move it to the rest of the body. Since the blood vessels of my lungs were becoming more and more blocked, my body was having trouble extracting the oxygen from the air I was breathing and sending it to my brain and muscles and other organs. This accounted for the fatigue, both mental and physical.

For months now, I haven’t felt good enough to write and it doesn’t appear that will get better immediately. I’ve had ideas for a number of things I wanted to write about, but it’s been a struggle to get past making a few notes. This is likely to continue for at least six months.

I am taking an expensive blood thinner called Xarelto. This is supposed to make it more difficult for new clots to form and it’s supposed to allow the existing clots to slowly dissolve. There are additional stages of treatment available — medication to directly dissolve clots and even surgery — but those have higher risks. I’ve been told to expect to be on the blood thinner for six months, but that is subject to change.

In the meantime, I’m not allowed to do anything even slightly strenuous. One of the doctors at the hospital when I was being released used examples as mundane as cleaning my house and cutting my grass as examples of things I’m not allowed to do right now. (The picture at the top was my hospital room until I talked them into letting me go home.) This is a challenge for someone who lives alone with seven cats and a dog — and my house is already showing the serious effects of my accumulated lack of energy from the past few months — but it’s just something I have to accept for now.

For the last five days or so, I’ve also had a serious cold on top on the clots, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time with pharmacists figuring out which medications I could take that wouldn’t conflict with the blood thinner or the blood pressure medication I was given. Random coughing fits leave me feeling as though I’m about to black out — and it’s hard to say which to attribute to the cold and which to the pulmonary emboli. I’ll be considerably better if I can get rid of the cold.

There are a lot of things I don’t yet know about what the recovery process is going to be like. If you have any medical interest and would like to know more about that, here’s an article I found helpful. This woman warns that “…it may take you upwards of a year or more to start to feeling physically normal and participate in activities again…”

It’s also going to be a challenging process because I don’t have health insurance. I used to have a nice Blue Cross plan — which was already expensive enough — but as soon as the federal government stepped in to “make insurance affordable,” the price skyrocketed, so I have no coverage. That will complicate everything for me.

I might have times when I have the energy to write something — especially when it’s a simple idea that doesn’t require a lot of thought or time — but don’t expect to see much from me for at least another six months. I’ll be busy managing several related crises instead.

Thanks so much for your continued interest in my work. I’ll be back when I can.

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Spring always reminds me how glorious blue skies and green leaves can be. When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Arnold chastised me for using those colors together. She said they didn’t match. Mrs. Arnold had very specific rules about which colors could be used together. We couldn’t deviate from her rules. When I used green and blue together in one of my class drawings, she forced me to do it over, since she said those colors shouldn’t be used together. I was a polite and obedient child, but I asked her why they didn’t match — since God used them together in nature. She was exasperated and told me to follow her rules. So when I see glorious beauty which mixes green and blue — such as this photo I took just outside my office Friday afternoon — it always reminds me of Mrs. Arnold. It reminds me that she was wrong. And it’s a good reminder for us all. There are established rules about a lot of things. Many of those are good rules. But if an expert tells you something and you know he’s wrong, you might need to take a chance. He might be just as mistaken as Mrs. Arnold was.

In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

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