Had an actual brush with death last Thursday. I had been dealing with a torn meniscus in my knee from a prior injury finally going to shit, so I had a proceedure to inject Cortazone into the interior of the knee. Big five inch needle jammed way in there, the hole thing injecting cortazone in the knee. Well turns out that I apparently allergic to cortical steroids. I get home and immediately get warm and rashy all over, fuckins swelling up (hard to tell on a fat guy normally, but turning red). And I start blacking out slightly. Wife goes to get some bennadril from the pharmacy at the end of our street corner and I start having tightening of the chest and shortness of breath. I sort of get better after one benedril pill, but pretty much tell wife to call 911 (never have done that in my life).
Here is where it gets funny. Things are getting dark and it is occurring to me that I am shutting down from anaphylactic shock (the EMTs measured my BP at 70/55 at one point) but I have been holding in a shit since before the knee injection. I resolve myself that I would apparently rather die than shit myself in an ambulance, so... I stumble to the bathroom, black out while pissing, wife yells me awake, take a dump and sort of pass out while doing that, then make it back to the couch. EMTs show up feed me another benedril and I stabalize. I go to the ER and get shoved in a room with a bag of pepsid(?) because the normal treatment for allergic shock is cortical roid based stuff, which is what I am crashing from. Once I walked out my front door to the gurney I was pretty much out of the woods, but shit was definitely going dark there for a couple points where I thought I might be done.
Of all the things to take my fat ass out, I would have never have croaked to an allergic reaction. Smart money would be on alchoholism, maybe beetus (strangely do not have at my size), or heart failure. Apparently there is a half a percent chance of this reaction to the injection (LOL so the shot is more dangerous than covid, statistically) and I was a lucky winner. I joked to the wife that I should bet on the Lions to win and of course the ended up winning Sunday.....
I am tired as fuck from the after crash, but not dead. No long term impacts from this seem likely, aside from now I probably cannot use roid treatments for my torn meniscus. I am not going to say the close brush with death scared me, but it definitely put some thoughts into my head about how I need to make sure certain things are addressed in case I do check out.
