This is the second blog post with something about dying in the title. I don’t want to do it and although one day I’m obviously not going to get out of it, that isn’t today or any day I’ve got planned. No thanks to the GPs at Leiston surgery in Suffolk, who felt that if I only bucked up and stopped moping about dying they could get on with whatever else it was they were doing when they couldn’t be arsed to give me a blood test.
If they had it would have found something I thought I had, on the basis of no evidence other than a word in my head since I was fourteen. Thrombosis. A blood clot. Mine was a rare one, in the iliac vein.
The iliac vein is a big one. It goes up your left leg and crosses over your spine, just about at the back of your belly button. Your femoral artery crosses over it in front. If you fly for more than an hour you ought to read the next bit carefully.
When I was in the womb my iliac vein grew curled around my femoral artery. When I got on an airplane and we went up through the clouds my artery expanded, as arteries do. Hugely. I’ve seen it on close circuit TV. I don’t recommend this and nor does any doctor I ever met. It gives you nightmares for a week. But I didn’t know that then. Just the way I didn’t know my own blood in my artery was crimping my iliac vein tight shut against my spine.
When blood stops flowing it clots. Mine clots fast. Cuts that other people have for a while disappear on me. A couple of seconds of pressure on a cut finger on me and it stops bleeding. Inside me, a big blood clot grew. A deep vein thrombosis.
These aren’t fun. Apart from messing you up when they’re stopped, slowing your circulation right down, the much more dramatic danger starts if they begin to move. Veins bring blood back to the heart, via the lungs. If you get a lump of blood stuffed into your lung, just like a bullet, by the time it’s stopped ripping things up you can be unhappily drowning in your own blood.
If it goes through your lung to your heart the fun just multiplies. The ‘Out” side of your heart has smaller holes than the “In” side. Your blood clot will go through your heart and jam in the exit holes, blocking the artery. Your heart is only designed to do one thing though and that’s pump. Which it will keep on doing until you die. Unfortunately, if your artery is blocked that might not be a very long time coming, because as any Mech. Eng. knows, fluid doesn’t compress. Your heart will keep pumping blood but there won’t be anywhere for it to go. Until it rips holes in your heart, after which it will go everywhere, unlike you.
But that might not happen. Your travelling thrombosis might slide right through your heart, through the artery and go on up into your brain. If you think you had problems before then you didn’t know what a problem really was. With the other stuff you die. Quite painfully and hopelessly, true, but at least quite quickly and nothing much else happens to you. A blocked artery in your brain though, that’s a whole new barrel of evil kittens.
I didn’t want a stroke. I didn’t want to have to learn how to eat with a spoon or shout abuse at the sound of my own name or have someone clean up after me more than our paid cleaner already did when she didn’t skive out of cleaning by standing very, very close to me and smiling a lot while she talked to me for two hours, an arrangement which suited us both at the time.
I didn’t want any of this. And I didn’t want to go on living the life I remembered my mother’s family living, or several of the older males anyway, sat in chairs inside in summer, sleeveless jumpers on, next to a roaring coal fire. Eleven years ago this year I knew exactly how they felt. They got fat and blocky because every time they moved their joints hurt and because they didn’t move their circulation got worse and they got fatter. And colder. And on, more and more miserably, uncomprehendingly on. I thought it was normal. I thought that’s what happens when you get older. When you have a congenital medical condition, it is. They didn’t
I thought it was normal. I thought that’s what happens when you get older. When you have a congenital medical condition, it is. They didn’t know what it was before they died uncomfortably. I do. And I find it very, very hard to forgive a GP surgery that took three years of my life because they simply couldn’t be bothered to do a blood test.
