I can now state with some authority that bleeding out is neither peaceful nor painless, contrary to what some people think..

The tale starts last Friday. The pool needed some chlorine tabs and a quick brushing, standard maintenance stuff. I put the chlorine in the dispenser and noticed I was more tired then I thought but carried on to brush the pool. I got about halfway done and was exhausted and my breathing was very heavy. Made it back into the house somehow, don't remember and collapsed onto the couch. I was fighting to breathe so hard I couldn't call to my wife for help. Yep, totally screwed...

Somehow <insert deity of choice here> was smiling on me because my wife happened to be on the phone with our daughter-in-law who is a nurse practitioner and came out to ask me something. She saw my condition and started telling our DIL what my state was and was directed to take me immediately to the ER.

ER triage routed me directly to a doctor, a blood draw and neuro exam to rule out another stroke. I'm pretty out of it but aware that I couldn't get my breath, they got the labs back and my hemoglobin was below the critical level, INR at 3.8 Took 2 units of blood before I could breath right again. From there I spent a week in the hospital while they searched for a bleed. Had to neutralize my coumadin to run a GI scope which found nothing, still awaiting the results of the camera pill. May have been blood oozing through the intestinal wall because it was so thin. No one has any idea why my INR went so high.

The wife and I got alone great with the nurses (send the night shift a couple pizzas and they really take care of you). One nurse quietly informed us that the gastro doc and the hospitalist had a disagreement about my treatment. The hospitalist wanted me off the coumadin going forward, the gastro informed him that if I had another bleed they could fix that with another transfusion, but they couldn't fix another stroke. Starts the coumadin again. More tests and finally get discharged but not before the hospitalist fires a parting shot My INR is 2.8 which he says is way to high and orders vitamin K for me, which I take with my daily batch of pills...My cardiologist is livid and proceeds to savage that doctor. Now we are back to square one getting my INR stabilized and I get to spend at least a couple months having weekly blood draws.