Random Terrain's Tetraternarium - Thought I Was Going to Bleed to Death

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Continued from my previous blog entry. My mother has been in a hospice place where people go to die since the last week of January 2017. She was scared and lonely when it got dark outside, so I started staying with her at night and have been trying to sleep for at least a few hours at home during the day whenever someone could find the time to give me a ride.

I can usually get to that hospice place by 10 or 11, but it was almost midnight by the time I was about to leave on Monday night (January 6, 2017). The last thing I had to do was put on my shoes. Simple, right? Wrong! I had a small varicose vein that looked like an itty-bitty tiny little baby grape just above my right ankle. I usually put cream on it to help keep it from getting dried up, but I forgot about it during the past few weeks. So when I sat on the bed in my mom's room to put on my shoes, the tongue of my right shoe lightly touched the "baby grape" over the pant leg and the bottom of my pant leg instantly became soaked in blood and an amazing amount of blood was gushing down into my shoe.

It didn't look real. I'm pretty sure I hesitated for a fraction of a second while stuck in a temporary fog of disbelief, then I clamped my right hand down on my pant leg over the area, but it didn't seem to slow down the bleeding that much. I remembered that I heard a car door slam as I sat down, so I assumed that my sister was on the way back in the house. I reached over with my left hand and yelled for her on the intercom and pressed the loud buzzer button a few times, but got no reply. I thought it was kind of funny that I might die sitting on my mother's side of the bed before she dies at hospice.

I decided to walk as quickly as possible through the living room to the front porch while keeping my right hand clamped over the gusher. It felt like I was playing a weird deadly version of Twister crossed with a single-person version of a three-legged race. "Right hand red, now race . . . for your life!" My sister was in the driver's seat of her car with her eyes glued to her smartphone, so I yelled and waved to get her attention. I could hear blood dripping between the boards onto the ground as she ran up the new ramp that friendly people built for our mother in January.

We got my leg up on the railing while getting the rest of me down on the porch. That helped to slow the bleeding some, but it was still pouring out, so she ran and got a towel and wrapped it around tight, then called 911. The first responders had a hard time getting it to stop bleeding. They asked me some questions and told me to stop taking baby aspirins. They had a look on their faces as if the whole baby aspirin thing was doing more harm than good for most people, but they couldn't say anything.

It seemed like it took forever, but an ambulance finally came and I crawled up on the gurney and they rolled me down the ramp and almost bounced me to death on the way to the emergency room.

I was in a room in the ER area for about three hours. When a doctor lifted off the stuff that was on my leg, blood squirted up like a tiny fountain about two inches high (rough guess), so she had a nurse get some kind of pad that had clotting stuff in it and wrapped up my leg again. The doctor said that sewing it up would probably create a worse problem, so they sent me home after a while when it was clear that no blood was leaking out into the wrapping.

I couldn't stay at the hospice place that night, but I was able to go the next night and every night since then.


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