Hello and welcome to the Drapelcast, episode 509. The Drapelcast is an audio fiction podcast magazine

that brings strange stories by strange authors to strange

listeners, such as yourself. I'm your host, Norm Sherman. Sorry for the delay this last month,

folks. Circumstances randomly conspired to do me in once again, this time suddenly with the

pulmonary embolism in the lungs, a blood clot, which I don't remember at any point breathing in, but nevertheless found

itself blocking blood flow to my lungs. I dropped by the ER because I was having some shortness

of breath, and because nurses are hot, and that's generally where you find them, and I wound up not

leaving because I could die at any gosh darn minute. But they got it out, and while I or any of us could still die at any gosh darn minute,

at least for me, the likelihood of it being from a blood clot in the lungs is greatly reduced.

You want to know how they got it out, though? Of course you do. You came to this podcast to hear

strange, harrowing, often disgusting, and or disturbing things, and I fancy myself one never to disappoint in that regard. Deep vein thrombectomy, which, not to be confused with Kanye West and Kim Garnashian's third oldest child, is when they enter a vein in your groin. Work a catheter up to your chest into your lungs, and proceed to suck clot like the rents depend on it. All while the clot addled norm in question is fully conscious and not sedated, because How then is one to go back and relive the precious memories made along the way. If you've never had someone explore your thoracic cavity by way of your groin and are thinking about it, let me be the one to say it's important to set your expectations low, unless you're expecting it to be kind of a nightmare, that is. The sensation of raccoons

rooting around for hot dogs in the trash is one I never expected to feel under my sternum,

despite the remote possibility crossing my mind nearly every hot dog I've ever ingested.

How's a raccoon even going to get in there, I'd say to myself, my femoral vein?

And of course, having never seen a life-threatening blood clot,

but being otherwise pretty familiar with what the contents usually found in lungs looks like,

I asked to see what they were pulling out of my chest via a hole in my groin.

You know, for due diligence.

And let me tell you, folks, blood clots look about as different from air as a thing that's not air can look like.

If collared greens immaculately conceived an inside-out baby, which thank God they can't, and then you snorted a line of that baby off a table because it got you high, which thank God it doesn't. And then doctors surgically extracted the bloody snorted up inside-out collared baby in chunks through a hole in your groin, which unfortunately they can do and do all the time. That's what a blood clot looks like. It's the last thing a raccoon would be excited to see while looking for hot dogs inside of you. Encourage your blood not to kill you, folks. It doesn't always go without saying apparently. And don't dick around if you're experiencing shortness of breath. Don't hesitate to check out some hot nurses. It just might save your life.

I'm healthy again and happy to deliver this week's story by far less unsettling means through

far less unsettling holes than the means and holes preferred by some outside of my pay grade.

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