Crying Wolf

I consider myself the girl who cried wolf. I am constantly so scared about reliving my past medical trauma, that the anxiety I have surrounding it feels the exact same as having the medical emergency I had at seventeen. No one believed me when I used to say I had pain. I was in peak physical fitness as a year-round field hockey player, I had no outstanding medical issues that needed attention, there was never any reason for me to be sick or in pain. “You’re fine. Are you bleeding? No? Then you’re fine.” Is the staple of how pain or illness conversations would go with my cardiac ICU nurse of a mother. She looks at open chest/lung and heart transplants/people fighting for their lives always — so she knew what actual pain and illness looked like. It was never me.

Remember I said I’d tell you about my trauma in high school? This is how it starts. I was a senior in high school. It actually wasn’t even the start of my senior year, it was preseason of my senior season, so early August. As a field hockey player, I was running about four miles per game. That doesn’t count warm ups, or practices, or conditioning: just the game. On our last day of tryouts of that year, the last test is always the town loop: a 3 mile run making a triangle around our school. I got about 600 feet before feeling a stabbing pain in my chest on my right side. I’m talking, like, keeling over in pain hurt to straighten my body pain was so bad. Once I got my breath back, the pain went away. It took about five or ten minutes for the breathing to become normal, but the trainer at my school and I were just like okay… weird muscle spasm… anyway…

Fast forward a week. Team selections have been made, and even with me not being able to run the town loop, I was still solidified in my spot on varsity and as a co captain for my last run. I was so grateful. We have a play day coming up the following day — a day of a bunch of high school teams scrimmaging each other. It’s not even competitive that early in the season, it’s more so for coaches to try and see where they can place their athletes on the field. As a senior captain, my dream was center midfield. I was always fighting for it because 1) my coach hated me which is a whole other story (by the way, hated you too), and 2) this other girl on my team sometimes played that same position. Coach finally let me play center midfield at this tournament. This is my moment to finally prove how amazing I am, I thought. Within about 2 minutes of playing, I can’t breathe. It was so weird how it went away when I was stagnant, but the moment I reached out to the ball or to make even a short run, that stabbing pain came back. I needed a sub.

During this time at the tournament, my coach was worried, somewhat, but more so confused. I was constantly seeing the trainer throughout the day, thinking I had to deal with that pulled muscle. Or maybe it was gas? You know when you have gas and it feels like you’re dying, but then you burp or fart, and the pain alleviates almost immediately? Ugh. I wish. That’s what my teammates and trainer were telling me was wrong with me.

Meanwhile, my parents are pissed. Why is she slacking off? She’s in the best peak performance of her career so far… what is she doing? Why isn’t she putting any effort in today? What the fuck? My parents came down by the fence to talk some sense into me. My dad’s words ring prominent in my ears still to this day: “Do you want to be like Jacoby Ellsbury, or do you want to be Gregory Campbell?”

To understand this verbal slap in the face, you have to know those two athletes. At the time, this was 2013, Jacoby Ellsbury was on the injured reserves list for the Boston Red Sox in his last season for six weeks because… get this… his thumb hurt. The worlds’ smallest violin for Jacoby. Next, Greg Campbell, a Boston Bruins center forward and a nasty, hard working player, had blocked a shot from Pittsburg Penguins’ Evgeni Malkin, which quite literally broke his thigh bone. Though he had just broken his fibula in half, he stayed on the ice until the penalty kill was over. He blocked two more shots in that time. He put his body literally on the line. That was the difference in not only baseball and hockey players, but the standard for which you push yourself to be the best in my house. So, again, my dad said, “Ellsbury or Campbell, Bri?”

After the tournament and a silent car ride, we stopped and got some food. I remember being so tired physically and emotionally that I couldn’t even eat my soup. I sat in the car until my parents were done with dinner. We should’ve realized by that really weird scenario that I wasn’t doing okay, because Joey Tribiani and I were raised the same: “JOEY DOESN’T SHARE FOOD.” We eat everything off our plate and then get seconds. We’re foodies! Anyway, when we got home, I went right to sleep, with the pain coming back in my chest. Damn, I really can’t get rid of this.

The next morning was a Saturday early morning practice on a dew-dropped field. I was there for about fifteen minutes before my coach looked at me and said, “Brianne… you look like shit. You should just go home.” Easy enough for me, I got in my car and drove home. The pain was still there, but worse this day. I thought my seatbelt was too tight, or maybe my sports bra? The pain wouldn’t subside. I got home and told my mom I got sent home from practice, tears coming down my face in pain and confusion. Startled herself, my mom called my doctor. Dr. Williams, my knight in shining armor. Dr. Williams didn’t really understand what exactly was going on either, but she suggested to my mom that I go to the emergency room to be seen. Something I’ll never forget is Dr. Williams saying to my mom, “…and Lisa, don’t wait. Do it now.” She knew my mom was an ICU nurse and knew that she wasn’t totally convinced there was something wrong. My mom hopped in the shower, blow dried her hair, got dressed, and to the hospital we went.

It’s fun having chest pain at the emergency room because that’s the sneaky way to bypass the wait and be seen right away. They ran a couple tests, everything was totally fine. I was on some pain IV fluids and getting blood drawn throughout a seven hour emergency room visit. The last test they did, a D-Dimer, which measures the protein in your body that is actively breaking down clots your blood has created, came back with some information. The normal range is anywhere between 100-500. My number was 5,000. Five thousand, you read that right. I was immediately admitted and sent to x-ray: 7 pieces of a giant blood clot broke off and clotted in my lungs. No wonder it was hard to breathe.

I remember my dad coming to see me in the hospital later that night, as he was working all day, and came in to my hospital room tail between his legs, saying, “I guess you were Campbell this whole time, huh?” I cried wolf for awhile in the sense that, yeah, I’m insanely dramatic. But now, sometimes, it’s hard for me to differentiate between my anxiety and the feeling of clots again.

My psychiatrist (don’t praise me for having one, it took me 8 years after this whole thing to finally get help. Don’t wait.) told me about phantom pain. I knew what it was, I think of it in amputee patients who lose under their knee, for example, and still have pain in their “leg.” She told me that what happens to the part of the body during an amputation leaves all those thousands of nerve endings traumatized. Just like an amputee, my lungs have experienced a great deal of trauma. So, when I have anxiety, I typically feel it in my chest. When those pains come back, it’s my body reliving a memory. My anxiety stems from many different aspects, but this is straight up medical PTSD. It sucks, and at the same time it is so god damn relieving that this stuff all makes sense.

When I was diagnosed with my clots in 2013, nothing made sense. Coming up on nine years later this August, it’s starting just now to make sense. So bare with me while I still navigate these new findings. It’s taken me way too long to regain control of myself, but I’m doing it. One therapy appointment at a time.