To continue...

So Deana brought me to RPI's infirmary. He looked at my leg, took some measurements of it with a tape measure, and told me I had a blood clot. I really didn't know what all that meant - just that blood wasn't flowing easily into my leg. He said it was in my veins... I asked how he knew it wasn't in my arteries.

"If you had a clot in an artery in your leg, your leg would be black."

Hmm. Well, that sounded fairly serious - I mean to make your leg turn black and all. So, Deana brought me to Samaritan. The doctors there told me I would be better off up at Albany Med. They said they had some more extreme treatments there, which they often preferred for younger patients like myself. So they called me an ambulance and whisked me off to Albany Med. Deana drove there alone, but she did call my parents on her cell phone.

My recollection of what happened at Albany Med. is a little fuzzy... I do remember waiting around for a long time. I think they used some ultrasound machines or something to check the blood flow. But when I finally got some medical attention, outside of checking blood flow and stuff, I guess my recovery started going really well.

They ran a catheter into my leg to kind of, I don't know, "ooze" TPA on the clot. TPA, as explained to me by some doctor there, is radioactive "clot-busting stuff", as he put it. They had me in intensive care, which is standard procedure for any patient on TPA I guess. TPA makes you bleed really easy. Plus, it's really expensive, too. $1000 per IV bag is what they told me. They also said they don't even let new nurses near the TPA - that's how expensive it is :)

Most clots break down after one bag... I guess I had a tough one, though. So they opened another bag and attached it.

The morning after the first night there, I started crying. I had a really good nurse - her name was Lee. She told me how she understood I was in a scary place right now (symbollically - Albany Med. wasn't really that scary) But Lee was great... she was always with me. I don't remember exactly what else she was there for, but every time I needed some sort of test or something, she came with me. Lee was awesome.

So, my other nurse, I think his name was John, he was the night guy... well, he came in and gave me umm, morphine and benadryl. Benadryl makes you sleepy, apparently. So he had just come in, and gave me that stuff. I was just beginning to fall asleep when my leg felt weird. I looked down, and there was quite a bit of blood around my knee. So I called John in, and he called the on-call surgeon to take the catheter out of my leg.

So that pretty much shot my relaxing mood to shit.