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Becca Pava is a freelance author as well as a professional patient with a terminal illness. She has been sick since the age of eight and her condition was deemed terminal about 8 months ago, That has not slowed her down one bit, In 2016 she graduated from Elms College Summa Cum Ladue with a BA in writing and a GPA of 3.98. and so far she has published multiple literary journal articles, and blogs online for a company called Verblio, and writes for TemplesHub, a company developing an app to increase overall wellness. she has also written two full-length young adult novels and has a third one on the way. When not writing, Becca enjoys reading and playing with her build-a-bears, mini brands, and dollhouse.
I struggled with low blood pressure my whole life. It wouldn't have been so bad, but I also struggled with tachycardia (too rapid heart rate) my whole life as well. The two issues combined were a recipe for hypovolemic shock. When I went into hypovolemic shock, we called it bottoming out. It was one of the reasons I was admitted to the hospital so frequently. "Any time you know you're bottoming out, that's an automatic 911 call". Dr Oster had told me. I could always tell when I had low blood pressure and a high heart rate and was going into shock. My skin would turn bluish-gray and I would alternate between having chills and hot flashes. The world would start trying to pin me down. Exhaustion would overwhelm me along with a pull towards the darkness of the unconscious. No matter where I was when the low blood pressure hit, I would have to call for an ambulance. If I was at home it wasn't the biggest deal in the world, but if I was in an embarrassing place it was awful. Pretty much anywhere in public fell under the category of an embarrassing place. The more people around, the more embarrassing it was. Sometimes I would need to call an ambulance from art class. Other times I would be at the mall or the park with friends.
The whole genre of my healthcare had changed when I first woke up, swathed in warm blankets after my emergency surgery for a bowel perforation. I had just been raced over from the children’s psychiatric unit ten hours earlier before my eight-hour surgery after one of the nurses realized that there was something seriously wrong with me. When she took my vital signs my blood pressure was in the basement and my heart rate was dangerously high. I'd also had a fever of 105.5. Suddenly I'd felt myself being loaded into a wheelchair and raced off the psych unit and into the CT scan suite. "They need to get a picture of the inside of your belly," Liz had explained to me when we got to the room where they do the CT scans.
Maybe if the hospitalizations in the month of November had stopped there then things would have been okay, but life with major medical diagnoses is never that easy. First I went to the hospital for dehydration, Immediately after that bloodwork showed that my potassium was dangerously low. I had to rush back to the hospital.
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