One Last Test
I went to the hospital with shortness of breath and my heart racing. They did a chest x-ray, a blood test for clots, an ECG, and a few other tests but everything came back normal.
After observing me overnight everything still looked good, oxygen saturation was perfect, my heart rate was still a bit elevated but nothing too crazy, and it seemed that it was likely leftover symptoms from a bad virus that I’d had a week or so earlier.
The ER doctor asks me how I would feel if they sent me home and I just had a bad feeling about it all. I told him as such and that I had no real basis for it except that I just felt off about it.
He said fair enough, let’s try one more test and if that comes back negative then we’ll send you up to General Medicine and see if they can track something down.
That test was a VQ scan. When I saw the results, I felt a chill run down my spine. Despite all other tests showing no results for blood clots, I actually had a whole bunch of them in both lungs.
I ended up with a diagnosis of unprovoked bilateral pulmonary embolisms and am now on blood thinners for life. Super grateful both for the bad feeling and the ER doctor who was willing to listen to it!