“Deceased Man’s Mysterious Symptoms: A Coherent Narrative Unveils Unexplained Illness”

Accident – death – Obituary News : Let’s begin with an action scene: I was in midair, tumbling sideways, heading for the floor of the Columbus Circle subway station. Not a place I wanted to be. Where I wanted to be was on the downtown 1, five or ten yards away, doors standing open. I’d made this connection more than a thousand times, though usually getting off the 1, not on it. This time, I was out of practice and I got it wrong.

After stepping off the downtown B or C, I took the wrong stairway and had to double back to get over to the right side of the 1. When I climbed up the correct stairs, the stairs I used to fly down every morning, straight from the optimal train door on my precisely plotted commute, I saw the 1 arriving. And then — well, if I knew exactly what happened, it wouldn’t have happened, would it?

What I registered went like this: I sped up, or I meant to speed up. Someone cut across my path. I tried to steer around them and my legs … my legs did something else. Or did nothing. The extra walking and climbing had taken too much effort, and my intentions lost contact with my legs. I reached out and tried to brace myself on someone’s shoulder; they were wearing a black-on-white shirt; I was so undone I was trying to make physical contact with a total stranger on the subway platform. I missed. All that was left was to hit the station floor, so I did.

I rolled to my knees and discovered that was as far as I could make it. My legs couldn’t get me upright again. One guy streaming by broke stride, asked if I was okay, and hauled me to my feet. I checked myself: no torn clothes, no blood. Another 1 was pulling in, one minute behind the train I’d missed. I got on and went where I’d been going.

I had just had a fall. Old people have falls. I had only just turned 52 one week before the September evening I collapsed. But the year from 51 to 52 had been a remarkably bad one.

I gambled on a job I wanted, as the editor-in-chief of a small magazine, and it ran out of funding. I sent applications to other publications and got thoughtful rejections. I sent more applications, and they went unanswered. I made an appeal for paid subscriptions at a newsletter I’d been writing. Its revenue flattened out at about 20 percent of my share of our living expenses. The household finances began to drain.

I picked up an adjunct gig, teaching a writing class on Zoom, three straight hours a shot, and the anxiety of filling the time — of giving the students what they were paying for — gathered into a lump in my upper torso until I couldn’t stand the taste of the herbal tea that was supposed to relax me and give me something to do with my hands on-camera. My shoulder locked up. I got pins and needles in my arm. What was happening to me?

I don’t go looking for medical-mystery articles in the newspaper, but when I see one, I read it end to end. The strangest things happen to other people’s bodies! Someone, if I remember right, fought a lingering cough for years because they accidentally inhaled a pea and forgot about it. The medical-mystery column has a beginning and a conclusion. In between is a fumble for clues, moving toward a flash of insight. Some doctor finally runs the right test, recollects the right journal article. The shapeless misery takes shape.

I went to see a shoulder specialist. He knew exactly what was wrong. I had trigger points, little knots in the muscle under the shoulder blade. He gave me some exercises — pin a tennis ball between the shoulder and the wall, lean back, and roll around on it — and a prescription for an anti-inflammatory. A few days later, I noticed my shoes were laced too tight when I tried to put them on. Another day and I made the connection: No, my feet were too big for my shoes. Google said that anti-inflammatories can cause swelling in the extremities, so I stopped taking the pills. My feet kept swelling, day by day, until my pink ankles looked like deli hams and I started using a butter knife as a shoehorn. I’d reluctantly spent some money to order a new pair of canvas sneakers, off-white, for the spring and summer, and I left them in the box, unable to face the thought of jamming my distended feet into them.

The pins and needles spread to both arms, like I’d slept on them funny, except the sensation lasted all day. I could still type through the numbness, though, publishing what I could for what money I could get. I stopped buying myself things that seemed discretionary — the good oolong tea leaves, crushproof imported pocket notebooks, a new pair of jeans — but some spending had its own momentum. My wife’s family had booked an Airbnb in Italy for April. It would be our first vacation since before the pandemic, our middle-schooler’s first trip abroad since he was in an infant seat. It would have been absurd to cancel just because I was between jobs. My ankle ached on the clutch pedal of the rented Fiat. I brought along a folder of unfinished tax paperwork. The amount I owed the IRS would match, almost exactly, a big freelance check I was waiting on. The deposit went into and out of my account on the same day.

I went to my regular doctor, whom I’d bypassed on the shoulder thing. He was baffled at the symptoms and frank about his bafflement. Swollen feet can mean congestive heart failure, so he referred me to a cardiologist. She instructed me to walk and then run on an inclined treadmill, hopping on and off for ultrasound imaging of my heart. I have — had — always been extremely healthy without being physically fit, so while I didn’t enjoy the test, I still passed handily. My heart was strong and well. Sometimes this kind of swelling just happens and then goes away, the cardiologist said.

Whatever it is, you won’t die of it.

I’ve told the story over and over, to various doctors, till it almost sounds like a coherent narrative. When I drafted this passage, in the dark, by thumb, on a phone plugged into the USB socket of a hospital bed, I’d been telling it to several people a day: general practitioners, neurologists, rheumatologists, radiologists, nurses, physical therapists, medical aides, a dietitian, a surgeon.

The story, I told them, happened in two parts. In the spring and summer, part one, I chased the swelling and numbness and other symptoms — stiff fingers, shortness of breath, tightness in the chest — in slow motion from doctor to doctor. Mostly, this was shepherded by the cardiologist, who seemed to feel as if, by ruling the problem not to be her business, she had made it her duty to discover whose business it might in fact be. I saw a neurologist, who talked me into spending $700 from our high-deductible health plan on getting my muscles zapped with a little Taser and told me the results said I had carpal tunnel. I did have carpal tunnel, but not really, not because my terrible ergonomic habits had caught up with me. The swelling had simply gotten into my carpal tunnels for a while. I ignored his suggestions for exercises and supplements, and months later, in the hospital, I got an email telling me his practice was going out of business. I saw a rheumatologist. He ordered a bunch of blood tests and suggested I take prednisone and something else. When I opened the paper bag from the pharmacy, I realized the something else was hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that had a moment in the news as a spurious COVID treatment. I took only the prednisone. My ankles stayed puffy. You could jab a finger into one and leave a dent that lingered. Before this, my hands had been loose-skinned and a bit wrinkly, the one part of me going more visibly on ahead through middle age. But now they were fat balloons, and my wedding ring wouldn’t go on. I saw a radiologist, who injected dye into my veins and took pictures of my legs. I saw a physical therapist, who gave me exercises, and a dietitian, who told me to eat more salt.

Part two of the story was in the hospital, where I checked myself in after my hands swelled and turned blue and the numbness spread up my arms. That was on a Sunday. By Tuesday, the swelling was down, but I was still there, in a room with an IV line in one arm and a pulse oximeter on a finger. I had an echocardiogram, a chest CT, a brain MRI. I had an angiogram, where the cardiologist threaded a catheter up my groin to squirt contrast dye into the arteries of my heart. They found a little plaque, of course, but nothing like what you’d expect in a man my age. I had a pulmonary function test, which turned up a mild deficit. I had a nerve conduction study, which found a little carpal tunnel but otherwise normal nerves. I had an electromyogram, where a neurologist stuck needles into my muscles, and he found normal muscles. I had a skin biopsy, which found nothing wrong with my skin. I had a sleep study, and I slept beautifully.

I was out of the hospital after four nights, and I was back to work almost immediately. “Work,” at that time, meant continuing a freelance writing gig that had given me a lot of work in the preceding months. I had been covering a lot of COVID-19 news, and I had a lot of contacts in the field. I thought I’d be able to use that to pitch stories, but I didn’t really know where to start. I spent a lot of time sending unsolicited pitches to editors and getting rejected. I also spent a lot of time writing articles that didn’t go anywhere. I pitched a story about the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the heart, but nobody was interested. I pitched a story about vaccine distribution, but nobody was interested. I pitched a story about the mental health impact of the pandemic, but nobody was interested. I was starting to feel like a failure.

But then, one day, I got an email. It was from an editor at a major publication. They had read one of my articles and wanted to hire me as a staff writer. I couldn’t believe it. After months of rejections and uncertainty, I finally had a job. It was a dream come true.

I’ve learned a lot from my experience. I’ve learned that life can be unpredictable and that sometimes, things don’t go as planned. But I’ve also learned that perseverance pays off. Even when things seem hopeless, it’s important to keep going and keep pushing forward. And most importantly, I’ve learned to never give up on my dreams..