OK. Here it goes. I know this will likely give me a panic attack, but whatever. Needs to be done nevertheless.
Here it is : I’ve been having trouble breathing lately.
Not all the time, but fairly frequently. Just today, I had a scary incident where the moment I lay down to sleep, I started having trouble breathing. It was like something was resisting my taking a breath. Like I was breathing through a tube, or like something was sitting on my chest.
That is bad. Very bad.
I tried just calming myself and doing my usual breathing exercises, but the resistance remained. So eventually, I had to give up on sleep and get up and do some of my vertical pushups (pushbacks? pushouts? pushaways?) in order to stimulate my breathing via a little cardio and then sit down and play Fallout New Vegas for a while in order to distract myself so that I could calm down.
Eventually, I calmed down enough to go back to sleep. But when I woke up again around half an hour ago, I still had some resistance to my breathing.
And that’s where I am right now. I can feel that resistance in every breath, and it takes some doing not to freak the fuck out and make the whole thing worse.
Clearly, I have to go see my GP.
Just called his office. Turns out he’s away till Monday, the 25th. Lovely. That means I can’t even make the appointment til Monday, and who know how long it will be before I actually see him?
I am so tired of his shit.
Why do these things always happen on Fridays?
My main worry is that my pneumonia is coming back. This feel eerily similar to it. Looking back, I can see that my breathing has been getting slowly worse over the last week or so but I have been subconsciously ignoring it until today.
I could go to the OR. I really don’t feel up to it, but I could. That would be the smart, sane, adult thing to do.
But I really don’t feel up to it. So I don’t think I will.
Not today, at any rate.
Tomorrow. I will get Joe to drop me off at the ER tomorrow. There, they can check my blood oxygen and whatnot and tell me if I need to be admitted.
That will give me a day to mentally prepare myself for the possibility of ended up in the hospital with an oxygen mask on my face again.
That would suck so bad. But it beats dying. And it beats ending up in the hospital with tubes down my throat.
Or maybe I will end up going in tonight. I don’t know. I need time to think it over and talk myself into doing the smart thing.
Time to go be a grownup and do something I really don’t wanna do.
I hope I can get my old tablet working. There’s only so much reading and doing crossword puzzles I can stand.
Maybe I will catch it earlier this time, and not end up in the hospital for ten days.
More after the break.
Back again. Still not in the hospital, obviously.
I am back to leaning more towards going tomorrow. My symptoms haven’t improved much but I still can’t face ending up admitted tonight.
If only I could bring my PC with me. Then I would be totally fine with an extended stay. I mostly play games all day anyhow, so as long as I had my PC with me, it honestly wouldn’t be much of an imposition.
Even if I had no WiFi, it would be cool. I have around a dozen games installed right now, and I could install more before I went in, just in case.
But I am having trouble imagining how being in a hospital bed and using my PC would work together. And that’s assuming they would even allow it.
I would not blame them for forbidding it on the grounds that all the cords and things might get in the way of their treating me.
I would see their point.
On the other hand, I know that some of the rooms have a little table and chairs tucked into a corner, presumably for visitors. So maybe I could set it up there and it would not be in the way too much.
At least then, I would have someplace to put the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Otherwise, even if it is allowed, things could get crazy pretty fast. Sure, I can put my monitor (which is fairly large) on that table thing you eat off of during mealtimes, but there would be no room left over for both the keyboard and the mouse.
The keyboard, I suppose, could sit in my lap. The mouse needs a firm flat surface though, and that might be hard to find.
There are some games I could play by mouse alone, I guess. Not FNV, though.
If i had to choose between mouse and keyboard, though, I would choose keyboard because then I could write.
Give me the ability to write and play video games, and a hospital stay stops being an imposition and becomes something more like catered sloth.
I wouldn’t even have to get up to make my own meals!
Of course, it might turn out to be nothing more than a chest cold and could therefore involve no hospital time at all.
That’s a nice thought. But I doubt it. This labored breathing of mine, plus the feeling that it has been getting worse bit by bit without my noticing, seems awfully familiar.
Then again, I don’t feel sick otherwise. I don’t feel fevered, I don’t have a headache, I am not nauseous, or at least, no more nauseous than usual.
Nausea and I have been through a lot together.
I guess I will see how I feel when I am out tonight and then decide if I need to go to the ER tomorrow or if it can wait till I see my GP.
Whenever the heck that would be.
I will talk to you nice people tomorrow, if I can.