This was the first of several experiences with anaphylactic shock. Three days later, I was home again. But two weeks later, I had the same reaction to aspirin. Somehow, I had developed a sudden, deadly allergy to this drug.
Okay—time to describe the joys of my new job. All of the following events from 1996 occurred approximately three thousand days since normal.
- Within a few months, I found that exposures to all the chemicals in the operating rooms often, by the end of the week, landed me in the hospital's emergency room. How convenient—only three floors below me.
- Meanwhile, I was hitting my own local emergency room (ER) about once a month. My doctor finally got me a nebulizer.
- Several anti-Semitic incidents later, and myself far sicker all the time, I left this job. These people were creeps; I also got slammed for using my asthma inhaler within the office space. Crazy, huh? It’s true. This happened to me.
- Meanwhile, my lawsuit was going well and by September 1996, we were within three days of the jury trial. Suddenly the case was thrown out. Or, as they call it in legal terminology, we received “summary judgment.” I never understood that or why the appeal was denied. We had hired the best environmental firm in the state and they had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that chemicals and mold were present in the workplace and that any one of these substances—never mind the combination—could cause asthma. And they proved that the public utility actually had records of some of these substances in their files. They didn't care—they had designed the space for mainframe computers, not for people.
- Three months later, I got re-employed at the same institution as a network analyst, just not at the hospital. Initially, things were looking pretty good.
- Over several months, my highly glorified internist—not my original doctor—from this medical institution had sent me to see an endocrinologist. I had been feeling very sluggish for a long time and my thyroid test results were troubling. The endocrinologist thought I might have an adrenal insufficiency.
Definition: If you have adrenal insufficiency, under long periods of high stress, you do not produce anywhere near enough cortisol, the hormone that helps us humans cope with everyday stress. Instead, you produce way too much adrenaline—the fight-or-flight-hormone. All kinds of dangers can ensue, including cardiovascular ones.
- The endocrinologist thought all this might be caused by the Prednisone. Except things did not improve when I stopped taking it. And my internist did not follow the endocrinologist's written directions to follow up with blood tests to ensure that I did not have adrenal insufficiency. Instead, he lowered the amount of thyroid I was taking. That made matters far worse for me. And meanwhile, my work unit had moved to another leased building. I started wheezing a lot.
Late May 1997
In the middle of the night of what was already Saturday, I experienced really bad burning in the chest. The internist months ago had said I had reflux disease (which I do not, by the way) and had given me one of the common drugs at the time. So I took a couple of those. Waited 45 minutes. Nothing was getting better. Took another one. Waited 30 minutes.
By 3 am, I was truly miserable. Although I had no other symptoms beyond this "reflux" that would not go away, I called the "on call" telephone number for the medical institution's network. The internist on the phone told me to go to the ER and they could give me something stronger for the reflux.
Fortunately, at that time I was living only 15 minutes from the ER. I drove myself there.
At the ER, they checked me in, gave me some liquid that quieted the burning sensation, and ran some additional tests. My EKG was normal.
However, my heart enzyme tests were abnormally high. They pronounced "myocardial infarction," commonly known as a heart attack. Me, the athlete, no heart disease or risk of heart disease.