Life changing...

I can’t think of a catchy title for this post because this is about the day my life changed....a few days before that I had been celebrating country music writers and stars in Nashville on one of the coldest nights remembered in an outdoor parking garage turned event space with hundreds of people huddled under blankets wearing long gowns, sleeveless dresses and their fanciest boots and shoes. I thought I was clever with a fox fur trimmed wool cape two turtlenecks, leggings and boots. Truth be told after a few hours of red wine, frozen canapés (no not frozen and heated just frozen rumaki stuck to a plate - side note even freezing cold cooked bacon tastes good) and a cold filet Mignon I wasn’t exactly freezing any more. I thought I was coming down with a cold. You know the kind, no real cough or runny nose but you think a really good expectorant will knock it right out. The next day traveling through the airport was uneventful as was the return to work, except for my acrobatic afternoon spree. Seems some loving co-workers food escaped their plate and the smallest bit of sauce landed on our wooden floors. I naturally slid on the sauce in my red leather boots with my left foot sliding forward and my right leg creating an impossible split I could never do without the help of the sauce. Cellphone flying I went down on my left knee. Trust me it was quite a sight. Icing my knee took my mind off what I thought was my developing cold until the next day. Enroute to work coming out of the subway I found it hard to breathe. I just couldn’t catch my breath. This had to be bronchitis. I’d never had bronchitis before so I assumed shortness of breath was part of it. Like most else in my life, I wasn’t going to let this sway my daily work or the weekend ritual at the nail salon. But by Sunday I wasn’t much better. The cough had not arrived but the heaviness in my chest and breathing issues continued. After breakfast with my mother-in-law (god forbid I miss a meal) my husband and I went to the local CityMD. Fortunately we had an unbelievable doctor on a Sunday at this walk-in clinic. She examined and xrayed my lungs. There was fluid (pleural effusion) in my right lung. We looked at the X-ray together. She pointed out that part of my ribs were obscured from view on the right side. Okay it’s bad bronchitis I thought. Some meds and it’ll clear right up. To her benefit the dr said she could give me meds but really thought I needed to go to the emergency room. Omg I thought, I probably got walking pneumonia from that cold outdoor event. yikes! My husband wasn’t that concerned either both us thought it was just some severe cold but we begrudgingly went to the emergency room at NYU. It didn’t take long to get triaged and into the actual emergency room after all I was having trouble breathing. I was assigned a gurney in the hallway and the friendly nurse Edward puttered around us, inserting an IV and taking blood. My blood work was fine, I’m lucky that way, no matter what my weight or what I eat I have cholesterol eating blood with low numbers. The drs in emergency reviewed the CD with the X-ray taken earlier and determined I should have a CT scan. It was remarkable I was so patient during the course of this 5 hour adventure in a NYC emergency room with real trauma unfolding before us. The CT scan was my first ever. The warm fluid flowed from the tube into my arm and through my body. The ct scan bed dipped me in and out of the scanner with humming lights of varying colors. I did my best to remain calm during this experience even joking with the tech that “after all this the least I could get was a tan”. The woman tech laughed (sure like they never heard that before) the man said “huh?” I was wheeled back to my corner in the hallway of the emergency room to await the results. An hour and a half later we finally started complaining about how long we were there. Our nurse Edward had gone on a well-deserved break and the replacement was not as entertaining. We talked to the drs and they offered us something to eat. While my husband went to get drinks they moved me into an official emergency room with curtains and all. I texted a friend who commented “you must be contagious” my reply “no I’m just obnoxious” figuring they just wanted me out of the way. That’s the moment my life changed and why I’’m having chemo at the same time as my mother.