My journey

So if you're reading this now. I'm going to tell you how I've come to be here. It'll started back in January 2012. I was just 31 when most of my problems started. I'd been suffering from a chest infection which seemed to clear up.
 However, the real problem began over the Christmas holiday. A few days before Christmas I was on my way home from work. I decided to pop to Aldi on the way home. As I got out of my car, at the Aldi car park I noticed that my breathing was somehow different. I felt like I was struggling a little to breathe in. My first thought was that my chest infection had not cleared properly. I hoped that given a few days, it would clear by its self. This didn't seem to be the case. The breathlessness seemed to get steadily worse over the next several days.

 Christmas Day came and by this point, I felt like something was very wrong. After I'd had eaten my Christmas meal, I decided it was too bad that I needed to go to the nearest walk-in clinic. When I arrived at the clinic, I checked myself in and waited to be seen by a doctor. I can still remember it even now, as I walked into the doctor's room. I sat down and began to explain to the doctor what had been happening and how bad my breathing had become. The doctor was completely useless! His answer was that I was having panic attacks so basically brushed it all off and told me to breathe into a paper bag.

I knew this didn't seem right and I really wasn't happy with his opinion so as soon as my doctor's surgery reopened, I was straight to my doctor. Over the next several weeks, I was going backwards and forwards to the doctors, complaining of serve shortness of breath. In the end, on the 3rd visit to the doctors, the doctor went out to seek another doctor for a second opinion. He came back to tell me that I was to go to the local hospital for a d-dimmer test and chest X-ray. I took myself straight away to the hospital where they did all the relevant tests.

The following day came the phone call from the doctor. He asked me to come straight to the surgery. When I arrived, the doctor was waiting. He gave me a letter saying that they thought I may have a PE. I remember the doctor telling me that it was very unlikely  but needed me to have some more tests... I immediately went to the hospital. I took the letter that the doctor had given me to give to the hospital receptionist. After a while waiting, I was called to see two doctors. They were asking me all sorts of questions to get a picture of what had been going on. To cut a long story short, They decided that they needed me to have a VQ scan the following day and that I should have a claxane injection to be double safe till they knew what was wrong with me.

So, the following day I arrived ready for the test. It's not the easiest of tests as you have to suck in air and then breath when they say. Part of  the test they inject dye into a vain. At the end it shows a scan of the lungs and any anomalies. Sure enough, a few hours later came the news. I had in fact suffered from a PE. How I'd managed to keep going was beyond me!

PEs are very dangerous and life-threatening. It mainly occurs from a DVT in the leg. In my case, nothing seemed to show up as having had a DVT. This is something I'll never know. The next thing I knew was that I was being sent to an anticoagulant nurse to be started on warfarin and given claxane injections. So here is where the story begins. Several years of not been well and not knowing why... All due to having a disease called Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension...