The Dangers of Color Blindness

It was early spring in 2001 and I was having a hell of time getting rid of a nasty cough. It had been hanging around for months, just kind of lingering and never really going away. The coughs had not, to this point, been productive. In other words, I wasn’t hacking up massive loogies all over the house I was just coughing. I had been going round and round with my doctor about what was going on. Since I was the picture of health in every other regards, he was thinking it was some kind of bronchitis or some such thing, treating it with stuff that you would normally get for asthma or something. These had little to know effect. Like I said, it wasn’t knocking me out, it was just really annoying.

            February becomes March and I was settling into a new job with great benefits in downtown Seattle. One morning over breakfast I had a huge coughing fit and hocked up a big wad of junk from the cough and my wife looked across the table and asked to see it. [Side note: My wife has a long history of sinus infections and other related miseries, she is somewhat of an authority on crap that comes out a persons respiratory system.] I need to point out that I color blind, standard red green colorblindness that afflicts 7-10% of the male population, nothing big but it looms rather large over this next bit. So I show the tissue you to her and she says, “You know that;s blood, right?” I had no idea. I just thought it was dark phlegm from what ever infection had taken root in my chest. The color blindness really worked against me here, as if I could see red and green effectively I would have (maybe?) noticed the blood a little earlier. Or not, since I am a guy and we have a tendency to ignore all but the most serious health issues.

            So I call the doctor and head down to Kirkland to see him. The whole blood thing has kind of freaked them out and so we do a whole work up, for what seems like the 10^th time, and add the element of a chest x ray. The x ray tech allows me to keep my shirt on, it was an orange cotton Grammacci shirt, with an embroidered logo on the left chest. The film gets shot and I head back to the exam room to continue reading Car & Driver, it was an article comparing performance wagons and we had just bought a VW Passat that was part of the review, so I was quite interested to see what they had to say. About the car, I was not thinking about the x ray at all. Time passes and Dr. Billett comes into the room, very concerned about my shirt and wanting to make sure that there is nothing in it or on it that would foul the x ray. There wasn’t and I asked what the concern was about and he said the first of many things we heard in the coming months that you NEVER want to hear from your doctor. Dr. Billett said that they were concerned about a ‘spot’ in my lung field.

“Huh” I said, in a rare moment of brilliance, “So, what, there is a dime sized spot in my lung?”

“It’s a little bigger than that.” He replied, and quickly followed that up with a question about how soon I could get to Evergreen Hospital for a CT scan?

Seeing the writing on the wall, I allowed as how NOW was a good time, and they got me set up for a noon-ish appointment. I now had a few hours to kill and a very pregnant wife at home that I needed to bring up to speed.