A close call

My son has been sick. It started about three weeks ago when he had a sore throat. He didn’t go to the doctor, but after a few days, the sore throat symptoms disappeared. Then he moved in with me, and told me he just didn’t feel good, that he was tired all the time. We were at Wal-Mart and I outwalked him, and you must know that I have a broken back that has several disk that are full of scar tissue and no knee cartilage and over all am in terrible walking health, in fact, I have been told by the orthopedic surgeon to not walk. Anyway, he, my son, became sick with chest congestion and high fever and cough. He was given antibiotics and while the antibiotics helped with the fever, he was still coughing. For a week, he would have moments where he thought he was feeling better, but by Saturday, he was pretty sick, unable to hold anything on his stomach, and he was coughing up copious amounts of dark and often frothy phlegm. I told him that he was going to the doctor first thing Monday. Well, Sunday, I had a meeting with some of my peers from graduate school, and when I got home, my son was in a terrible condition. He looked gray, his feet and legs were swollen so much that they were like dough. I touched them, an indention stayed for five or six minutes afterwards. I took him to the hospital ER and when they told me he was going to wait, the mother bear in me kicked in and I told the reception person that my son was not breathing well enough to sit in the lobby and needed immediate attention or I was going to call an ambulance to pick him up at their hospital and have them take him to the other one across town. They took me serious when I began throwing what medical terms I know around and they immediately took him back. I was right, he was gravely ill. After all the tests the doctor, a young man of maybe 17, stayed with us, as well as they brought the crash cart to my son’s bedside and they were taking drugs out and giving them to him IV. He was, after many test, diagnosed as being in Congestive Heart Failure, hypertensive, an infection around the lining of his heart, pneumonia. They finally agreed the cause was the heart murmur that he had when he was a child, the one the doctors all said he would out grow. They were wrong. His murmur turned into a prolapsed mitral valve, which is a lower grade one, but the infection from his throat and his pneumonia was enough to cause the heart valve to become less functioning and the blood from his heart became harder and harder to get passed that valve until finally the blood just pooled. He wasn’t getting oxygenated blood and that caused his blood pressure to go up which made his heart worse which eventually made the infection spread to the compromised heart. Everything is better; he is off the critical and off the serious list and is now stable, in a room and off of the heart monitor. He might get to come home Friday. While he doesn’t have heart damage from the Congestive heart failure, he will have to take hypertensive meds and heart meds for the rest of his life. He will also have to live a different life, no fast food, no salt, no high fat stuff. He is only 28. The doctor said that while his being sick was a bad thing, it may well have saved his life. If he had not gotten sick, we would not know about his heart condition and while this condition can be a benign type of thing, it is one of the leading causes of death to athletes and my son plays basketball with his friends all the time. The doctor said my son could have just dropped dead, but now that they know about it, and are treating him, he should live to be a fussy old man. I am happy, not that he has this heart problem, but that he recovered. He might get to come home Friday. Yeah!