Three Weeks Out of Surgery
The evening of January 12th seemed like any other evening. Looking back, I think my head might have started throbbing that night before I went to bed. But I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly or if it’s just a case of hindsight being 20/20. Either way, I didn’t have an inkling that within a few hours, I would be bleeding out my nose so much it would look like a murder scene.
Three weeks earlier I’d had a brain tumor surgically removed from my head. From December 23rd until January 12th, I’d been working my butt off in all kinds of therapies. Every day, I had been gaining strength. My vision wasn’t as blurry. I had more energy. The blood pressure cuff was showing me readings that were the most normal I’d ever seen in my life.
All the weight that had mysteriously piled its way onto my petite frame, was melting off me with every passing day. Some of the bright pink striations on my skin were fading to a silvery lighter hue. The network of bruises scattered across my body were turning yellow and green. They were much less noticeable. For once my heart didn’t feel like it was sledgehammering my chest as rapidly.
The Night Started Off Like Normal
On the night of January 12th, I took my nighttime medications for all my various health conditions. I took my meds for gastroparesis, malabsorption, asthma, GERD, pain, A-fib, orthostatic hypotension, tachycardia, Cushing disease, depression, insomnia, and more. Once I had dutifully swallowed at least ten pills, my mom gave me a kiss and said good night. As usual, the medications kicked in and I fell into a heavy dreamless sleep.
Waking Up Bleeding
When I woke up, I didn’t know what time it was or why my face and pillow felt all wet. I grabbed the walker by my bed and got up to go turn the living room light on. The wetness was pouring down my face and it didn’t take me more than a few seconds longer to realize that my nose was bleeding to the point where it was more than you could even call a whopper of a bloody nose. Despite the fact that I could tell my nose was gushing blood and was the worst nosebleed I’d ever had in my life, I wasn’t prepared for all the blood that I saw when I turned the light on.
My pillow was drenched in blood, the sheets were covered in blood. I had left a thick bloody trail from the pull-out couch to the light. There was blood all over the wood floors original to the old Victorian-Era house. I was bleeding so much that I was tracking crimson all over the house.
Bleeding Out a Murder Scene
Not only did the room look like a murder scene from a particularly savage attack, but my nose was still bleeding out gushes of blood. I grabbed the bucket I kept by my bed in case I needed to throw up and held it under my chin. It was a little late for that, but whatever. Then I screamed for my mom.
My mom heard the sheer panic in my voice and picked up the intensity of the situation with her mom-radar (yes, it’s a real thing) and came running down the stairs faster than I’d ever seen her move before.
“What happened?” she asked me with her composure calm but her eyes telling a story of panic and horror.
“I don’t know, I just woke up and it was like this,” I told her.
“I need to get you to the hospital,” she told me, “And I can’t take you in the car like that. There’s too much bleeding, you’ve already lost a lot of blood. We need to call 911.”
Bleeding and Waiting for the Ambulance
While waiting for the ambulance to arrive I managed to fill halfway, one of those pink basins hospitals give you for toiletries, bathing, or puking.
“Could this be from the surgery?” I asked her.
“I’m sure it is,” my mom said. “I’ve never seen your nose bleeding like this before. You don’t get nose bleeds. Anyway, I’ve never in my life seen or heard of someone bleeding this bad from a nosebleed before.”
It seemed like it took forever for the ambulance to arrive as my mom and I tried ice, holding pressure, squeezing the bridge of my nose, and then just resorted back to letting it pour into the bucket as nothing else was working.
Hospital Bound: Lights and Sirens and More Bleeding
When the ambulance arrived my mom quickly explained to them about my recent brain surgery that was performed through my nose. The EMTs wasted no time in getting me on the stretcher and into their rig. Once in the ambulance they applied gauze to my nose and held pressure, but I kept bleeding, quickly saturating the gauze, and leaking through. They tried to get IV access four times before succeeding, awkwardly took my blood pressure and pulse around the new pink basin they had given me to bleed into, and rushed me, lights and sirens, to the hospital.
Clueless ER Resident
I was taken straight back to one of the high acuity rooms as soon as we arrived at the ER. My mom arrived about fifteen minutes later. The doctor finally managed to stop the bleeding with a bunch of tongue depressors taped together in a matter that reminded me a little bit of a duck’s beak. “I don’t think this has anything to do with your recent surgery.” The ER doctor told my mom and me, once the bleeding stopped and I was getting a pint of blood.
“You don’t?” my mom asked.
“No, I think she’s just a kid with a nosebleed. The surgery was already three weeks ago. Everything should have clotted off and gotten situated by now. If her nose starts bleeding again then just use this splint to hold pressure on the nose.” he said, showing us the tongue depressor duck beak.
My Mom Trying to be a Safety Net
“I don’t feel right about this,” My mom insisted. “She’s never had nosebleeds before in her life and now she has surgery where they go in through her nose and within less than a month she has the world’s worst nosebleed and you don’t think it’s connected?”
The doctor continued to insist, to both my mom and me, that this was just a big coincidence. We left the ER with the duck beak and a feeling of terrible unease