Pictured: what organ failure does to your SRL game.
I don't recall whether I went DNF or not, but I packed it up after that one game and went back to bed. Somehow, I achieved REM sleep. And felt better the next day. Not well. Better. I maintained a reduced-but-constant level of abdominal pain for a week. I scheduled an appointment to see the gastro about a possible ulcer. Appointment was 5 weeks hence. That made heading to the ER a pretty easy call when that night, one week after the first, intense pain, the intensity returned. In triage I found out I was negative for signs of infection, then sat in the ER waiting room from 11pm to 8am waiting to be seen, counting the minutes to my next dose of hydrocodone for the pain. Pissed off the whole time because I was missing first night of Iron Banner.
CT showed kidney spots. Likely infection. But - what about me not having signs of infection? Yeah, well, follow up with a urologist. Here's a script for antibiotics.
I missed the second night of Iron Banner due to pain. And vomiting from the pain.
Early on New Year's Eve, I got in to see a PA at the urologist's office. First thing she said: "Looking at your record, I don't think it's an infection. Here, let me . . ." she gestured for me to turn around. Surprise, she knuckled into my lower back. "Nope. If this were pyelonephritis, you'd have jumped out of your skin just now. I need to discuss with my colleagues, but I think you have renal infarctions."
"You mean, like, dead tissue?"
Yes head nod. "Probably blood clots. They choke off blood flow and the tissue dies."
After some patient advocacy I was able to score a repeat CT scan on a better machine (and with proper technique, since the first one was apparently botched from the get-go), and that confirmed multiple spots of dead tissue in one kidney.
So, back to the ER. Only this time, minimal waiting. And, morphine. I was there for a couple days to get my most-of-me scanned for additional clots. Didn't find anything. I was rocking pain meds and blood thinner. All was right with the world. Got back home Saturday, looking forward to scoring a Haakon's Hatchet. I wasn't able to put in much time with the remaining Iron Banner. My wife made me promise to lay off the game until I was better. And that was . . . sensible.
So I did.
But once I returned to the game, I decided I wanted to make an effort to join the community. Oddly enough, given the solo ethos of my sub-optimal destiny.
Here's the thing, guardians: humans are not performing as intended.
E.g., my prime-in-law began his relationship with vertigo a few years back. Some crystals get shaken out of their requisite spots in the inner ear and - blam! - vertigo. "Why," I asked Optimus Prime (my dad, natch), "would the body be set up to fail like that? Why have so vital a system - balance - have its maintenance depend on some marbles remaining in just the right marble holes? I'm asking, dad, why we lose our marbles." Optimus Prime, you see, is a physiologist by trade. So.
"Well," Optimus answered, in his way, "the human body has not evolved to exist longer than about 30 years. Things fall apart." And you and I can supply the rest of the Yeats quote, thanks much.
As I was struggling in the dark with my mysterious clotting and infarct-ing ailment, I read a post on the Bungie.net forums about a guardian seeking to honor his buddy who'd died due to a blood clot that traveled. Gaming related, I took it. Trying to locate that thread just now, I see several other gaming/clot threads stretching back to the Halo days. Even though my own clots were not caused by remaining stationary (at work or at play), I advertise to you, dear reader, the importance of stretching those gams.
One of my bosses put it, when he saw me trying out a makeshift standing desk (cf, fetal position desk): "I try to get up and walk to the kitchenette every twenty minutes or so. I only fill my water bottle a little bit, to make sure I have to get up again soon." And I have really not taken that to heart. But I invite you to do so. Lest you take a clot to the heart. See what I did there?
