(04-06-2024 03:19 PM)Redbanksdog Wrote:  This isn't something that grinds your gears but something that will strip your gears.

Woke up Monday morning with sharp pains in my left lung and it hurt to breathe. I was coughing up some mucus. My dumb ass figured it was my blood clots in my right lung were moving to my left lung and it will come to past. Like I said, I'm a dumb ass sometimes. Monday night was hard for sleeping. I woke up Tuesday morning and still had the bad pains and sometimes the mucus I coughed up had a little blood in it this time. The best way I found anyway to get some sleep was sitting up, it only helped a little bit if any at all. I woke up Wednesday morning with all the pain and hard to breathe. Told the wife I might need to go to the hospital. About an hour later I told the wife to call an ambulance so I could go to the ER.
I got to the ER and I was in a room in 15 minutes. They did all the test, blood, x-ray, CT scan etc;. They gave me some morphine for the pain and that did help. Come to find out I had pneumonia. I have to tell you, that never entered into my brain. I'm almost 70 years old and I keep telling myself, son you're not 25 anymore.
I'm feeling better now and I just wanted to share my story. I will probably have a Heart Attack when I get the Bill.

Just think of it this way. Your bill would have been a lot cheaper if you called your doctor the day you had the pain. I had a dear friend of mine who was head nurse at a major trauma hospital. She told me the following when I put off a health concern which fortunately was taken care of before it got me. "When you hurt that's your body's way of saying, "You ain't doing right fool!" and she added, "And when you get to the hospital tell them every little thing that's wrong, 'cause in the hospital, the squeaky wheel survives!" "Funeral homes will charge your family as much or more and generally aren't covered by your insurance policies, and they are filled with the corpses of real men who tried to tough it out, and who when they got to the hospital always prefaced their remarks with, "I think I'm alright but there's something that might be going on in my ...."

Redbanksdog, the brave face the truth and survive. It's just not smart to ignore warning signs because (1) they can be fatal and (2) they always cost you more if your wait.

But God's speed in recovery!