1.
Twenty-five feet above the ground, I changed my grip and reached for the next hold, straining at the oddness of my body’s position before my feet slipped off the small chips of molded plastic screwed into the climbing wall for the second time in a row. The auto-belay slowly lowered me to the ground.
I unclipped my harness and sat on the large mat that covered most of the floor in my rock climbing gym. I examined the bottoms of my climbing shoes, but the rubber on them was fine. That meant it was on me. I needed to think about my body position for my next attempt.
I was an hour into my workout and sweating fairly profusely. I remember thinking, “I’m on a roll. Let’s try that 5.12 again.”
A rock climbing route rated “5.12” in difficulty is not quite beginner or intermediary. Perhaps closer to the beginnings of advanced but definitely far from elite or professional. Especially on an auto-belay, a mechanical device that clips onto your climbing harness and automatically belays you, safely catching you and lowering you to the ground.
Along with running, climbing is my exercise of choice. I love the physicality, grace, and strength of it. And most importantly, being able to solve problems (climbing routes and moves) with both mind and body.
I got back on a 5.12 I was working on. I pulled off a couple of moves that felt easy, still on my way to the difficult move or the “crux” that I had not gotten past, when my foot unexpectedly slipped again. This time, the amount of tension and surprise in my body caused my right foot to savagely kick the wall (instead of putting my foot on a hold like I was planning to do).
The result: immediate and brutal amounts of pain.
I’ve stubbed my toe many times in my life. Even accidentally kicked climbing walls several times. One so bad, outside on real rock, that when I took my shoe off, my toe erupted with blood.
Nothing like this. Man. It just hurt so freaking bad.
As the auto-belay lowered me, I didn’t wait until I got to the ground before wrenching my climbing shoes’ velcro off, eager to reach the ground, unhook myself, limp to where my stuff was, plop myself on the floor, and take my shoes off.
Blood was already present in multiple places and more coming. The toenail itself, already blue.
The pain was so bad that I couldn’t sit still. I walked circles around the gym, limping and knowing in my gut that this was the time I had finally broken a toe if not lost a toenail.
I was done for the day, if not for longer, but I couldn’t fancy myself driving in such pain, so I took my time leaving until I was more focused and controlled.
Driving home, I focused on my breathing, in and out. Long breaths. Each exhale a serious moan that I was glad no one could hear, though I knew my stoplight compatriots would see a weird sight if they looked into the cab of my truck.
After 10 minutes of breathing and moaning and just straight up agony, I was less than two miles from home. That’s when the tingling began. It started in my fingertips and quickly enveloped both my hands and then my forearms. Lightheadedness followed. Was I passing out? Why? I had only hurt my toe. What was happening?
I pulled into the parking lot of a pawn shop, telling Siri to dial my wife’s number.
2.
Here is where I tell you that we just adopted an infant. After six years and four bouts of intrauterine insemination (IUI), we decided that the next step in our family planning couldn’t be In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Lots of great things have come from IVF. My niece came from IVF. It’s amazing. But we just couldn’t do more injections of hormones and then deal with the possibility that things wouldn’t work out. Plus, both of us are teachers, so on the financial front, it was asking a lot of us. For our situation, lots of stress lay in IVF.
But there was another option that dramatically increased our chances to become a family: adoption.
I can’t really go back and succinctly describe all the complicated feelings that went into this decision, but I can say that we felt it was better to invest in someone else’s birth story instead of focusing on the stress of our own journey—though adoption is not stress-free, we would come to find. With adoption, we could focus on giving, in a way, to someone else and their child, our lives uplifted together. It was bittersweet in that it felt like we were giving up on a story we had made for ourselves and our legacy in this world, but I can’t tell you how much this worry has been completely replaced by the joy of the result.
And we are grateful with the way things turned out with our adoption agency. Lovely and strong people live in that world, and we couldn’t be more thankful.
But one of the realities of adoption is the financial cost. It’s expensive. We applied for applicable grants but were not awarded any. We were considered well off enough to handle adoption costs through the normal process. This is very understandable. Such a high upfront cost should not be a barrier for someone wishing to do good in the world. We could make it work, and we will still eventually receive a large portion of our fees back from the state sometime after the adoption is finalized in a couple months.
We started serious financial planning before we decided to go through with IUI and had to baton down the hatches even more with adoption, as it is far more costly. We saved and saved and then had a setback when my wife’s car went down. It came down to the wire when we were finally given the call that our son would be arriving in two weeks. (With adoption, you never know whether it will be a slow process or quite an immediate process.)
Amidst the joy and exhaustion of becoming new parents, we found out my wife was pregnant. It was a heady time for both of us after years of planning for a family with no results and then being handed a one-two punch in one month. We were so excited that we made the mistake of telling more people than we should have before my wife’s 10-week checkup. And that’s when we found out there was no heartbeat.
I had never heard of a delayed miscarriage before my wife’s 10-week checkup, but we’d been through a heck of a lot, and we opted to go to the hospital and get a procedure done that would relieve my wife of the trauma of the past that was still present within her. During the process, we were offered to take part in a test that would help us understand what had happened and could possibly explain our infertility. We had no idea insurance wouldn’t cover such a test, but who wouldn’t want to find out the problem of so much hope gone kaput?
3.
Back to me and my truck, parked in a pawn shop. Toe in so much pain. My wife on the phone, 40 minutes away, eating lunch with our son and my wife’s mother.
“I’m parked in a pawn shop,” I said, feeling like my lungs weren’t getting enough air. “I’m going to pass out. My toe hurts. I kicked the wall. My arms are pins and needles.” (I assure you, I did not speak so orderly or even in complete sentences.)
“You hurt your toe and you’re going to pass out?” said my wife. “Honey, you are hyperventilating.”
I knew this wasn’t what was happening. Hyperventilating is when you are breathing fast and quick. My breaths were long and controlled. What I was most afraid of was my heart. It was all I thought about. Sometimes trauma causes heart issues, right? But there was no pain in my chess. This did not matter on account of the fact that you don’t think so clearly when you feel like you are going to lose consciousness alone in the parking lot of a pawn shop, the metaphorical context jabbing at the edges of thought, not sure if you will wake up to continue to be a new father to a three-month-old son.
It was my wife who said in words what we were both thinking: “Take some breaths. Are you sure? The ambulance and the emergency room, that’s a lot of money.”
It was why I had called her first instead of 911. I was hoping that her voice or her wisdom could solve my issue. But my panic pinnacled. I called 911.
The ambulance was quick. And the three men that came with it were professionals. But by that time I knew I had possibly made a mistake.
For starters, I hadn’t passed out. And even though my hands had started to malfunction when I was dialing 911—me almost pawing my smartphone’s screen, getting the numbers mashed up, having to delete and restart—the tingling had halted its progress and had mostly subsided. I now had full function of my hands.
Still, what if it was my heart?
In the back of the ambulance, they checked my blood sugar. I had had a light breakfast of maybe three hardboiled eggs. It was now well after midday. Was I just lightheaded from lack of food? Idiot, I thought. But no. My blood sugar levels were within range.
“Does your chest hurt?” said the medic.
“No,” I said, feeling more confident that I was going to be okay and that this was just a big overreaction. “The tingles, I think are going away. I feel better. Not like I’m going to pass out anymore.”
“That’s good. I still think we should take you in. You look very pale.”
“Okay.”
The medic got on the phone to the hospital we were heading to.
“Patient suffered a toe injury from kicking the foot panel of his truck. Patient experiencing tingles in arms and lightheadedness. Patient is sweating a lot and….”
“No,” I interrupted. “I kicked a rock climbing wall. I was exercising. At a rock climbing gym. That’s why I’m sweating.”
“Oh. Sorry.” The medic finished the call and then said, “Sorry again. I thought you were angry and kicked your truck.”
“That would have been a heck of a kick,” I said. We both laughed, though when I looked at my feet, I could see why he thought what he did. I was wearing Chaco sandals. Kicking anything in those would be a very bad idea.
At the hospital, the doctor treated my toe first. Another sign that I probably shouldn’t be there. Good news: it wasn’t broken. The bad news: the toenail was most assuredly going to come off. (And it has.)
Then she explained what had happened.
There are two types of hyperventilating. The first type is the one that everyone is familiar with and the one I described above. It’s when you breathe in and out very quickly, depriving your body of carbon dioxide.
The second type fulfills the same ends but with the opposite approach: you breathe in and out in long breaths. After some time, there comes a point where the carbon dioxide drops to a low level, and you get all the symptoms I felt.
The realization was painful. I was well aware of “box breathing,” an intentional type of breathing SEAL teams do to center and calm themselves whilst heading into combat. You breathe in for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 4 seconds, out for 4 seconds, and hold again for 4 seconds before starting over. (Notice the breath holding parts?) For a couple weeks, I had tried box breathing as a trick to fall back asleep to combat middle of the night insomnia and knew its theory, though I didn’t stick with it.
Putting me further the in the I-should’ve-known category was that I had read James Nestor’s book Breath, which is all about breathing and deeply goes into the effects of carbon dioxide on our bodies. But in my pain and panic, I didn’t make any of these links and still am unsure if I had ever known about this second type of hyperventilating. (Those I have talked to after the incident had no idea either that you could cause hyperventilation through controlled long breathing.)
Thus, I had just undertaken a very expensive trip to diagnose that my toe was not broken and to learn about a fault of overbreathing. I was the hyperventilating toe guy.
4.
Lots of people have been in such a scenario, weighing the expensive option of immediate professional aid versus one’s financial state. I know there have been plenty of times, after an accident, where this sort of emergency room and ambulance triage has played out either alone in my head or with a group of concerned people. Even having said that, what I’m about to say is controversial, and I must insist that you take it with the humanity with which it is written. I know the flaws of the following argument, but yet I think the perspective is an important one, for it is not the only one, and my experience is most assuredly the less serious story out there.
It is an awful feeling to weigh the cost of medical treatment against one’s own safety. Should my wife and I have saved more money for any possible emergency, especially when adopting a child and caring for that child’s frequent and necessary health checks? Most assuredly. But we are not money wasters. We keep to a budget, and we only spend what we can afford. We saved for IUI, and we saved before our adoption. And we’ve planned for not only a one child existence but two, on the fly, including childcare costs and the like. What happened to us financially in the last couple months was the perfect storm.
But is it?
As teachers, my wife and I have dedicated our lives to one of service. We know full well that our lives won’t ever be financially cushy.
I grew up in that cushy lifestyle, living overseas and flying around the world. I know its comforts and its excesses. It’s amazing. But what I wanted in life was a life of service, and I knew that such a career meant the life I had grown up in could only be in my past and not my future.
Furthermore, we’ve paid tons of money (we will still be paying my wife’s student loans at least for the next 7 years until, we hope, they are forgiven because she teaches in a Title I school) to colleges and universities to do our jobs and be highly qualified. (Teachers are required to continue their education to renew their teaching licenses in Ohio.)
Not only do we give money, we give our own time, outside contract hours, to be of service to our students.
I have to stop here because even though I believe what I believe, it looks whiny. I get it. We get summers off. And we have great jobs. My wife and I both love the communities we serve. I have great colleagues, great administrators.
But I can’t help but think that there is something wrong with all of this. Not that I should make more money or spend less time working or whatever. I want to do my fair share. But should anyone have to worry about money in the time of a medical emergency? Teaching is not the only job where one has to come to terms with salary and vocation.
Here I could go into all of the GoFundMe and other internet donation site campaigns I’ve seen for those who have serious illnesses. All helping to pay for treatments that could saddle someone with lifelong debt. How can we allow this to happen to people already burdened with serious medical issues, some temporally or permanently life-threatening?
During the adoption process, a friend floated the idea that if I created an internet fundraiser for our adoption fees, my work and personal communities would donate and cover a lot of our adoption costs. Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t think we deserved it. We were not in dire straits, but funding medical expenses shouldn’t come to this.
Here is a story. It doesn’t provide a solution, but it is a story that we have all seen or witnessed. And if not, it rests in the pride of not telling. And I’ll leave it at that.