December 2008 – "Wakeup Call" – Part 4

Finding  the Problem:

Just for those who need the comfort of specific dates, I can tell you that Georgia (also known as my Princess, my Bride, my Sweetheart, and many other endearing names) and I arrived in Utah on the 17th of December. The weather was pretty cold and it snowed regularly. Usually we either get a motel room or stay with Jennifer, but this time Ben and Melissa were gracious enough to offer us a place to stay, and we were delighted to take them up on their offer. Yes, I love my grandkids, but staying with Ben and Melissa promised to be much quieter, and being an old fogey, quiet is sometimes the name of the game! Unfortunately, it isn’t a need for quiet that proved to be a problem. It was a matter of not being able to breathe comfortably which kept me from getting to sleep. Every time I lay down I found myself having difficulty in getting enough oxygen into my lungs, but I attributed it to the altitude change and expected it to go away in a day or so. An extra pillow to prop me up seemed to help considerably. However, this continued for a couple of days, but I still blamed it on an inability to adjust to the change in elevation. Bad guess! Each night got a bit worse, and I was getting really annoyed at my inability to adjust to the altitude. However, it did not interfere with either the wedding or the family get together on Sunday. It was just an annoyance; until Sunday night.

It was then that I spent most of the night sitting up on a couch in the basement until I transferred to an upstairs couch. Sleep, or the lack of it, was no longer the issue. It had gotten to the point where I was having great difficulty breathing even when sitting up, and lying down was totally out of the question. By the time Ben and Melissa got up on Monday morning I was markedly worse. Walking had become a terrible chore, and it exhausted me just to cross the room. Even for “Mr. I’ll be OK” it was obvious that something needed to be done. Something like seeing a doctor. I think my Sweetheart almost went into cardiac arrest when I suggested that it might be a good thing if I saw a doctor. She has since told me that she had been waiting twenty years to hear me say that, and particularly that last year when I was working killer hours. Melissa got us the address for the nearby Instacare which is basically a “doc in a box.” A place you go when you don’t have a doctor of your own. In this case, it was one associated with the hospital where her father practices which did give me a pretty good level of comfort.