Two weeks later

Let me start by stating that unprovoked clots in your lungs - meaning there is no cause that can explain their presence - is truly a shitty deal.  I am the girl who wants answers to everything.  The girl who disassembled my curling iron in high school because I wanted to know how it worked.  The girl who needs to know everything about everything so I can project plan the shit out of it then make appropriate entries into my calendar like marching orders to follow precisely.  How else can I accomplish everything I ever want to in life? Not knowing where we go from here is truly fucking with my brain.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Immediately following my diagnosis I was focused on getting from day to day.  The shock of almost dying was surreal and I still don't really know how I feel about how close I could have been.  My first goal was getting my anti-coagulation established.  Those super expensive injections I had to give myself twice a day hurt like hell and my first personal aspiration was to quit having to take them.  Which meant my INR test had to be above a 2.0.  Three times a week I stop in at my doctors for a finger prick to test this.  The day after diagnosis, I was .9.  A week and a half later I was above two after once having to increase my daily dose of Coumadin.  Finally no more shots!  That same week and a half had me feeling better with a bit more spring in my step every day.  Two days post diagnosis I couldn't walk through Scheels without needing a bench to rest.  But, two weeks later, I went for my first run.  I could only run a couple of minutes at a time with stretches of walking in between but it felt like I was running my first race and accomplishing a personal record.  The smile on my face was ear to ear.  This was irrefutable evidence that the clots in my lungs are disappearing and I'm almost all better.

Now let's talk about Coumadin and what it means to be anti-coagulated.  It sucks hairy-ass monkey balls.  I'm a bleeder now who bruises easily.  That hangnail I absently picked at during a meeting?  Oh, don't mind me with blood dripping off my finger.  No, officer, my husband doesn't beat me, I just ran into the bar stool someone left pulled halfway out and I'm anti-coagulated.  All those other bruises?  Yeah, I have no idea how they got there but I swear no one is beating me. Worse than all that is the dietary restrictions.  I can't eat leafy green vegetables?  No spinach?  No lettuce?  No broccoli? No asparagus?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Do you know how hard it is to take a brain that is wired for nutrition and real food and then suddenly you can't eat it?  At least three times in the last week I've gone to bite into a delicious meal only to realize it had something in it I can't eat.  Thank god I didn't have to alter anything about my coffee habits.  Had that happened on top of everything else I might be murderous rather than just bitchy.

Which brings us to the shitty deal I'm facing now that I'm out of the woods and getting back to my normal activity levels:  There is no end in sight for the Coumadin.  When I tried to nail down my doctor with a time frame to expect this to continue he said "at least six months but more likely longer."  So now I'll be a runner who can't eat her veggies and who might bleed out if she doesn't check her clotting factor twice a week and gets a bruise.  Ain't that just grand.  And why?  Because no one knows exactly what caused my blood clots in the first place.  Even though I was taking birth control after the age of 35 which actually states it can increase the risk for exactly this to happen.  On the bright side, I can run again.  Oh, and I hit my deductible on my high deductible healthcare plan so now I can get that IUD that I couldn't afford to pay for out of pocket and which started this whole fucking mess for free.  At least I can still run...