Content Warning: medical talk, photos of blood, bruising, and x-ray imaging
Over two years since my last trip to a hospital, I was due I suppose.
I hadn’t been breathing well for a few days. I think it started around the time of the hail storm last Sunday. Maybe I’m allergic to tennis-ball-sized hail. Whatever the reason, I hadn’t been breathing great. I was still wheezy and coughing stuff up and tired and generally not feeling great when this Monday came. I was just getting ready to go to the pharmacy for an inhaler refill when the attack hit.
I huffed on my nebulizer, it wasn’t helping. I used my rescue inhalers, it wasn’t helping. I was on the top floor of the house struggling to refill the nebulizer while gasping for air when I realized my vision was getting dark and the panic set in. I got down the stairs and grabbed my phone and dialed my friends who live down the street. No answer. I call again. No answer. I may have left a message, I don’t remember. I couldn’t hear anything. I was just gasping into the phone that I couldn’t breathe. I managed to text.
I think she had answered the last call I tried. I didn’t know. A minute later, a friend burst through the door. (They had lost my extra key, but luckily my door was unlocked.) I made sure they locked the cats upstairs so they would be safe. My other friend came in a minute later, and took over calling emergency services. The first person she got on the phone wanted me to talk to them on the phone. My friend explained I could not breathe. They asked me to say my name and my friend held the phone up to me. I just gasped. They routed the call to someone else. They wanted me to talk to them on the phone, or say my name, or maybe recite the French national anthem or something. My friend explained again that I was not breathing and thus it was not appropriate to be asking me to talk to them instead of SENDING SOMEONE TO HELP. She left to flag down the responders into my alley (wow that sounds dirty).
There was this (horrific) experiment done where they put rats into buckets of water and timed how long it took them to drown. Then they took more rats and put them in buckets of water, but this time they would save the rats at the last second. Then later, after the rats were rested, they would put the same almost-drowned rats back into buckets of water and again time how long it took them to drown.
The rats who almost drowned the first time but were saved took longer to drown the second time.
When your brain knows, or even just thinks there’s a possibility that help is coming, it finds ways to hold on.
I’ve been in this situation many times. Hope is a paramedic on the way.
I’m not sure how long it took them to show up. It felt like a long time. I was in the hallway of the ER an hour from the time of the call to emergency at 15:00.
The responders were very much like the responders in the US from my experience. You’ll be gasping for air and they just casually meander about trying to ask you questions while your oxygen count drops. They eventually hook me up to an oxygen tank while my friend gives medical info, covid vaccination status (fully, thanks), etc. Then they want to take me out of the house. I don’t want to be taken out of the house. I go anyway. They take me into the ambulance and start to draw blood. A lot of blood. A lot a lot of blood. I counted 8 vials before looking back at my friend standing at the end of the ambulance, confirming my “holy shit that is a lot of my blood I need that blood to live”.
There is a doctor there, he says we need to go to the hospital. I don’t want to go to the hospital. We go to the hospital anyway. My friends can’t come with us.
We live in a small village, the hospital is in a nearby large town (commune), population about 15,000.
I’m texting cat care instructions as the ambulance maneuvers its way to the ER.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of my biggest fears has been those deep nasal swabs they take for testing. The sensation makes me want to throw up just thinking about it. I managed to make it until this Monday when my full vaccinated ass had to be tested for being admitted into the hospital for a fucking asthma attack and I was devastated.
A nurse came up and said something about “covid” and held up a long skinny swab. I nodded in understanding, may have even muttered a “d’accord”. Up it went. And it was just as awful as I imagined.
From there they wheeled me to what I would soon be calling “The Oubliette”. It was a room in the bottom corner of the hospital across from a bathroom. There was a large, thankfully slightly open window with views onto an access road. But also trees. I could hear the breeze outside and was grateful for the fresh air.
For some unknown reason, a nurse came in with a giant, scooped-end needle and drew blood from my motherfucking wrist and I have no idea why when they had already taken most of my blood in the ambulance and I know they had it because it came in with me. She just made me bend my wrist back and poked around and then JABBED AROUND and it fucking HURT and I would NOT RECOMMEND IT.
I was given a panic button, hooked up to saline, and left alone. I was mostly left alone for the next three hours. Twice I was given a 10 minute breathing treatment and then waited an hour and some minutes for someone to remember I was there.
My attack was calming down, but I needed more treatment and I needed to not be left alone for that long with no answers. I could nebulize myself at home. Luckily my friends had made it to the hospital via train/bus, and one was attempting to get answers. After I finally texted that I was going to start having panic issues if they left me alone much longer, my friend managed to side-step their no visitor policy to insist she be there to advocate. Once she showed up around 19:30, things started to happen. We were shuffled up and down floors until there was an argument over whether they had x-rayed my chest (they hadn’t), so we went for one of those.
Apparently in France, you get to download your x-rays from home. Maybe they do this in the US but I’ve never come across it in my poor people circles of medicine.
Eventually we make our way to the final boss, which is the doctor who was there following the ambulance when they came to my house. He points to some of my blood work (thank fuck all that blood was for something useful), and hands me prescriptions for a bunch of meds (some useful, some not) and sends us on our way. I’m still wheezing and coughing up fluids but I’m grateful to be let out in time for us to get the last train at 22:10. (It’s a very long walk from the hospital to the train, which is awesome when you are recovering from an asthma attack and have no rescue inhaler on you and there are no pharmacies open.)
Thankfully we got some food on the way home (that I didn’t eat until the next morning but it was good to have) and I managed to shower a bit (asthma attacks make you sweat a lot) before laying down at 23:00, though not really laying down, more propped up on the daybed/corner of the wall so I could breathe better.
I’d say my “treatment” at the hands of the responders, nurses, and doctors was pretty similar to the US. They don’t seem very understanding of what asthma is or how to deal with it. The outcome of test results I can use and no one asking us to pay for anything was much more than you can ask for in the US. There could be billing that happens for something through my official health account here, but I’m not in fear for my life about it.
And I’m lucky to have an actionable plan where I can now schedule a doctor appointment and have test results that will support my request for new medications and/or a referral to a specialist for under $40. And I just got what would probably have been $700 of medication in the US for about $35 here.
So while my actual experience with the “care” part of needing emergency response wasn’t the best, for what it costs me I can forgive it. And I’m still alive. Because I am fueled by equal amounts of rage, fear, and love of cats. And because some people made sure I got some oxygen in a crisis.
I still have a lot of costs to cover. I’m not healthy enough to be hauling cat litter or cat food from the store in town and need to have it delivered which costs much more. As I begrudgingly posted last week, I don’t have a steady supplemental income and am entirely reliant on Patreon to pay bills which is already not enough for me to live on each month (well below minimum wage in France). I’ll be in recovery for the next couple weeks, with multiple medications at every meal and at bedtime, and breathing treatments throughout the day. And then there’s the medical trauma bucket getting filled again. Any support/sharing of my work or just my ability to keep breathing is always appreciated.
