My wife started coughing up blood last week. She had a really unusual event of coughing very hard for about three full minutes, so I figured the coughing had broken a blood vessel in a lung and was causing the hemoptysis (which simply means ‘coughing up blood’. But it’s a fun word.)

Although a little gory, a few milliliters of hemoptysis is not necessarily immediately life threatening… but the underlying cause can be any of over a hundred different things, including cancer and a lot of other deadly and semi-deadly diseases. So we got on the hump and make it in record time to the local hospital, where they did X-rays and a CAT scan and more on that later. In any event, they could not figure it out. So we got Air Evaced to the big hospital about a hundred and fifty miles away. Where we ended up staying for several days. I slept on the floor, which was fine, because I wanted, and in my mind needed, to be with her.

I had about half an hour to get whatever we needed for the journey and stay at the hospital. Home was twenty minutes or more away from the hospital. No way I could get there and get things and get back in time. I would have missed going with her if I’d tried it. (more…)