The Day I Found Out My Life Was Hanging by a Thread (2017)

It started while I was on a Hawaiian vacation in May. I thought I’d just tweaked my back lifting a poolside lounge chair. Back home, my back pain became severe, and I started noticing nerve pain in my legs. For eight days I could barely crawl around the house. My wife and two daughters nicknamed me “the worm.” At 45, I’m in pretty good shape—avid cyclist, runner, weightlifter, yoga enthusiast with a resting pulse in the 50s.

So it was weird when my primary care doctor put me on a cocktail of pain killers, nerve blockers, and cortisone shots. I even tried acupuncture. But as my back began to improve in late June, I started to feel off. Sick to my stomach. Weak. Couldn’t sleep. I lost more than 10 pounds. But I chalked this up to a month of too much Vicodin after a lifetime of thinking two Advil was excessive. My doctor said I was fit and healthy and that there was no need to run any blood tests. He wondered aloud if this was all in my head.

It wasn’t like work was driving me crazy. Just the opposite. As the CEO of the startup Mighty AI in Seattle, I was on a roll and having a blast. Our company, which produces data to train artificial intelligence for self-driving cars and other applications, was racking up new customers, building new capabilities, shipping better software, and beating the competition. We were getting buzz. WIRED and The Financial Times wrote about us. There was a feeling that our growing team could do anything we needed to. Morale was high, and our company was still small enough—45 people or so—that I could chat with anybody at work about real things in life besides work.

Unfortunately, my nonwork life was getting all too real. Usually I’m pretty good at unplugging from stress. When I’m feeling down or the shit is hitting the fan at the office, I unwind by hanging with my wife, Amy, and our daughters, Anna, 14, and Elsie, 11. I’ll play some music or go for a bike ride.

But that stopped working this summer. At the office I felt guilty for not putting in 100 percent effort. At home—well, I was a worm! After nearly a month of feeling horrible despite my back getting better and being off all medications, I hit a wall. On July 26, a Wednesday, I finished my day’s meetings and drove myself to the least busy ER I know of—the one at Swedish Medical Center in the Issaquah Highlands, 20 miles east of downtown.

A couple hours later I called Amy and asked her to join me. They’d already done a bunch of tests and ruled out the obvious—urinary tract infection, epidural abscess—and were sort of grasping at straws. Over the phone, I asked Amy, who is a clinical psychologist, if she could think of anything else I should tell the doctors. “Have you told them about the night sweats?” she asked, her stomach sinking. The look on the ER doc’s face when I passed that on should have been my first clue. (Night sweats are a symptom of some early cancers.) They drew more blood and did a CT scan.

About an hour later, a doctor who specializes in hospital admissions joined the ER doc to report on their findings. The ensuing scene is seared into my brain. He introduced himself to Amy and me so awkwardly that we could not understand him. I gently interrupted his prepared remarks to ask his name, hoping this might put him at ease.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2w7xXo2