Jarad Curtis: CLOTTER

Nothing much new to write about lately. Oh, unless you’d be interested in reading about Jarad’s PULMONARY EMBOLISM (for those of you who, like me, need a lesson in medical-ese: that’s blood clots in his lungs. You know, the stuff of strokes and heart attacks). Huh? How does that happen to a 32-year-old marathoner you ask? Yeah, that’s what the docs are asking too. It’s been a crazy few days, but the good news is that Jarad is going to be just fine… once the clot that’s causing all the pain gets smaller, he’ll be back to normal. Whatever that is.

Another piece of good news is that we have the most amazing family and friends who have taken care of kids, meals, prayers and support for us so I’ve been able to be at the hospital with Jarad almost 24/7 since we came to the hospital on Thursday morning. So to all of you we say THANK YOU SO MUCH. You will never know how much it has meant to us.

Here’s what happened: Tuesday evening Jarad coughed – once, not like a sick cough… just a throat-tickle cough. He said “man, it feels like something just flew into my chest.” But he figured it was just a tweak or something. The next day he went about his normal day – work, coaching, running etc. – but as the day wore on he felt increasing pain in his chest whenever he took a breath.

Wednesday night around 8 he fell asleep on our bed and woke up at 10 in serious pain. We figured he had just tweaked something inside – you know how sometimes you take a deep breath and get stabbing pains, then something pops and it’s better… We discussed going to the hospital, but figured it wasn’t a heart thing since it didn’t really have the symptoms of heart problems. No, we never even considered lung problems! So I gave him a Vicodin pill left over from my surgery and we went to bed. The alarm went off the next morning and I heard Jarad get up to start the shower. A few minutes later he was shaking my shoulder saying “I’ve got to go to the hospital NOW.” Not something a wife ever wants to hear her husband say, since by the time a husband says something like that you know the pain is excruciating.

We called Jarad’s dad to come over and left the 4 kids sleeping (again, tells you how bad the pain was that we couldn’t wait 5 minutes for Grandpa to get there!). Of course he was brought right in at the Emergency Department, since he stumbled in clutching his chest and unable to breathe. Right away they did an EKG and ruled out heart problems, and the triage nurse said his symptoms pointed to a blood clot in his lungs or pleurisy. Neither sounded good. They ran a whole battery of tests and finally gave him something for his pain. After about 3 hours, they had pinpointed the problem as multiple blood clots in both lungs.

The theory about why the clots formed is that Jarad got on a cross-country flight within a few hours of running a half-marathon last Sunday in Virginia Beach. The doctors are baffled as to why someone so young would form them, though, so they are running tests on his blood to find out if he has a genetic predisposition to clotting.

So here we are today, Sunday, Jarad’s fourth day in the hospital. He’s on a couple of blood thinning medications and a lot of Morphine. When his blood has thinned to the required level he will be able to come home. The bad thing is that his pain is not going away as quickly as the doctors (and he!) had hoped, so we don’t know when he will be able to return to work and other normal things.

Jarad has a great sense of humor about this (he jokes about being “eye-candy” for the nurses, since he’s in the Telemetry unit surrounded by cardiac patients who are at least twice his age) and is in good spirits. We have both had our moments of being frustrated, bored, scared, etc. but for the most part, we are grateful that it has turned out so well given what the outcome could have been. And it doesn’t appear that he will have problems with this in the future.

So that’s what we’ve been up to this weekend. What about you?