Using a throwaway to keep anonymous because I’m not ready to tie this to my main account yet, but you’ve probably seen me around.

Last year I suffered an unprovoked pulmonary embolism. If you don’t know what that is it’s blood clots in the lungs. I had several showing up on the scanner, with part of my lung being collapsed from non-usage. Thankfully, I had physical therapy and I’m doing great now in terms of lung capacity, back to pre-illness levels.

How to describe it, you basically go to bed feeling fine one night, and wake up the next day with searing pain in the ribs. I’m 30 (actually just turned 30 at the time it happened) and I understand not everyone gets pulmonary embolism as their 30th birthday gift lol, so that was worrying.

The treatment is simple, because some 10-15 years ago what’s called new blood thinners came on the market. you just take a pill in the morning, it thins your blood and it dissolves the clots. Back in the day you’d have to get blood tests done every week to make sure the older blood thinners worked. You take the medication for 6 months and after that you should be fine.

Except my embolism was unprovoked, meaning that we have no idea what caused it. In that case the medication is extended “long-term”, which is a nice way of saying “assume it’s for life”. It doesn’t mean lifetime per say, it just means that we don’t know when I can stop taking it.

For 9 months now I’ve had absolutely terrible nausea, as if my body was completely rejecting the medication. It can happen at any time of day for any reason, but is usually linked with physical effort (even any light physical effort like putting away groceries) or talking for more than 2 minutes. It can quickly transform into vomiting, though thankfully nothing comes out, but everything else is as if I was trying to puke my guts out.

It’s difficult to convey how debilitating it is without writing a wall of text. This is the third time I’m rewriting this part lol. Just to give you an example, I used to go to the gym 3-4x a week before the PE. Because of the nausea, I can’t go anymore. There’s no point. Even if I feel fine before going, I know I will get sick on the way and even worse during the exercise. So what’s the point of inflicting myself this kind of torture just to get half a workout in. That’s the kind of decisions I have to make on the daily. Before we knew it was the medication side effect I thought maybe if I got back into a routine and physical exercise it would go away, but it didn’t lol.

I had my specialist on the phone this morning to talk about the “new” medication I’ve been trying for a month (it didn’t fix anything) and she basically said there’s not much more she can do. We’ve tried all the medications because my case is quite specific in what it requires, but I have an apt with her on Thursday to talk about it more. And going on disability. If there’s no solution (and I’m not expecting a miracle solution to magically make all of this go away), then I’ll have to go on disability benefits. I mean, I’ve already stopped looking for jobs because what’s the point? I know I can’t handle one right now, I could barely handle going to the interview. I avoid long drives because it could be dangerous.

There is one silver living and it’s that I was more of a homebody before that, so it doesn’t completely upset my life. But I won’t lie it does do something when you learn you can’t do the stuff you could do before, instead of choosing not to do it before. that was a wall of text anyway lol, i tried.