Member-only story
I Almost Died From Health Misinformation
Here is what I learned
I knew something was up when I couldn’t breathe.
It was a week before Christmas 2020, and I was walking from the library where I work to a nearby Subway for lunch. The walk takes ten minutes. I’ve done it many times.
This time, though, my breathing was heavy. Not Apollo-Creed-after-ten-rounds with Rocky-Balboa-heavy, but heavy nonetheless. “Weird,” I said to myself, and thought no more about it.
As the week progressed, I had one or two similar incidents, but I still wasn’t alarmed. It’s stress, I thought. Or maybe I’m just tired. On Christmas Eve, my fiancée, Maria, and I returned from picking up that night’s Honey Baked Ham with trimmings. It was maybe twenty-five steps from the car into the house, and the bags of food weighed, oh, ten pounds at most.
That was enough to put me on the sofa, sucking in air like a bellows.
Maria knows when someone is sick. She nursed her mother, a cancer patient, for years until the latter passed away. Plus she is a lawyer. Lawyers are trained to assume the worst.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Just trying to catch my breath.”
“Does your chest hurt?”
