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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There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

I’d like to write a modern version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — a more cynical one — with a realistic ending for today’s audience. In this new version, the little boy points out on social media that the emperor is naked but nobody listens to him. Instead, everybody keeps posting grander and grander praise for the emperor’s non-existent clothes. The cognitive dissonance makes the people unable to hear the child who tells them the truth, because they’re getting social media praise — likes and so forth — for their lies. The confused child eventually feels so defeated that he shuts up and walks away. He’s so hurt and disappointed by this that he withdraws from the world and spends years in therapy, trying to figure out whether the rest of the world is crazy or if he’s the crazy one. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be that little boy, but few want to hear the truth today. Either I’m crazy or else our culture has gone insane.

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