Pulmonary Embolism
I googled the phrase “shoulder pain breathing”. I’m sure some of the results that pop up are helpful to folks out there, but nothing really hit the nail on the head of what I felt. Fully lucid and aware of this sharp pain somewhere deep in my shoulder, but without an exact location I could point to and say “it hurts here”, the image in my head of what was going on was trippy, almost cartoonish. I pictured a big gaping hole at the tip top of my right lung and when I took a deep breath, my lung would fill from the bottom upwards, almost like liquid, and the air seeping out of that hole once I breathed deeply enough caused the pain.
I think why I’m struggling so much right now is that I don’t know how to stay still. I know how to rest, I know how to take days off, I know to embrace an off-season, I’ve recovered from plenty of injuries in my day, so I am familiar with the act of being patient. I just struggle with sitting still. I like to plan and I like to do for the gratifying sense of accomplishment.
And in the blink of an eye — or as quickly as the physician said the words “you’re going to be on blood thinners for a period of time” — I was suddenly without a plan. My previous plan, my 2022 schedule, remained chock full of rides and races there in late July, but that quickly became moot.
The literal specifics of what’s happened go something like this. I felt this mysterious shoulder pain on a Sunday morning. It went away with an hour or two and I went about my day not giving it another thought. Late the following evening, I didn’t sleep very well. I rolled around in bed experiencing that same shoulder pain, again where a deep breath caused it to hurt the most. So eventually getting up to feed my seven week old son at five in the morning, I was googling ”shoulder pain breathing”, but it wasn’t until I did some deeper sleuthing that pulmonary embolism popped into the results. I texted my PCP and a friend who’s an ER doc, explaining my symptoms. That is, a funny shoulder pain when breathing and otherwise I feel like a million bucks. Traditionally there’s swelling or bruising in the leg, shortness of breath, and a general sense of not feeling right. Lacking all of those, we weren’t too concerned, but I went to my doctor’s office for a d-dimer test. That came back with a slightly elevated result, nothing off the charts, but enough to warrant the next scan, which is a CT of my chest. That required a trip to the emergency department, so Laura and I made our way to the hospital. It’s a funny thing to casually stroll into an ED feeling otherwise fine, just with a smidgen of angst. Eventually I was called in, did the CT which offers a binary reading: confirmed, pulmonary embolism was my diagnosis. Damn it.
Actually I swore a lot more than that. Not to the doctor, I had the civility to wait until he left the room.
Continuing this chronology, I was immediately put on blood thinners. It’s a six month stint of thinners, which takes us through to early 2023. In the aftermath of the diagnosis I underwent a whole battery of tests. More blood tests, a CT of my abdomen, an echocardiogram, an ultrasound of my legs, probably another one or two things I’m forgetting. In uplifting news, it’s all come back very healthfully — that is to say, I’m in very good health. (I’ve learned not to say “things came back positive” because we’ve been looking for things like abdominal cancers and that’s not a place where you want to use the word “positive”.)
This was all taking place while hosting Rooted Vermont. I’ll admit it was very tough to put on a happy face when hosting 1200 people who are out racing their bikes when I’m unable to. The whole weekend was in fact quite fun and very uplifting for my soul, but still a tough thing to be working through with only my closest friends and family aware of what’s going.
So back to the blood thinners, this period of time is meant to allow my body to dissolve the clot. The danger is being on blood thinners and crashing, of course, so that’s why my competitive season was prematurely wrapped up right there in the ER. Naturally, getting on a bike is dangerous. So is driving in your car or walking down the stairs, so there’s still the considerable element of needing to live one’s life.
I am not hellbent on cycling. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be public about this and I would be racing Leadville and Steamboat, just erring a bit more on the side of caution. Perhaps much like you, cycling is where I reap my endorphins, it offers mental clarity and my daily dose of normal. Now with two very young kids at home, I’m all the more cautious knowing that I have a couple dependents to keep happy… but it’s all the more reason to seek a little solitude and hit the daily reset button the best way I know how.
To be honest, I’m uplifted by the number of people who have reached out to say they’ve gone through something very similar. Athletes and cyclists in particular who have waded their way through these muddied waters. It’s reassuring to know I’m not inventing the wheel here.
Speaking of wheels, we have a new set of them. Namely a Sprinter van outfitted by the awesome folks of PTCH, a Place To Call Home. This has been the plan for a year or more. With our growing family, we needed a new rig, so we sold the old one, and got this awesome beast made for a family of four. We were going to wrap up Rooted and start driving to races, and that’s still happening. But instead of both Laura and I racing, Laura will pull the King family name along and I’ll be there cheering, riding, changing flats, and having a good time on my bike too. We couldn’t quite make it to Leadboat, so first stop is Last Best Ride in Montana.
So there we have it. This is all a lesson in patience as much as it’s a lesson in pulmonary function as much as it’s a lesson in appreciation for the things I love. I have given myself permission to be pissed, but know that I’ll be back. Onward. Upward. See you out there, peace.
