In this short story, Shane shares his experience with haemoptysis, and how learning meditation has helped him cope with these experiences. Please note this may be confronting for some.
So, there I was sitting on a bed in a hospital with nurses and doctors all in the room with me. I was leaning over a bowl coughing up blood and looking at my father and thinking to myself, this is it. I’m going to die.
Let’s stop there and let me take you back to the beginning.
Hi, I’m Shane, I am 30 years old and I was born with cystic fibrosis (CF) and this is what happened the first time I ever started to bleed from the chest and thought that I was about to die.
So my story starts being born with CF and growing up in the 90’s with CF. Not a lot was known about the illness at that time so from as far back as I can remember, I was always told if I was to start coughing up blood that I was going to die.
Well in 2005 at the age of 15 it happened.
It was in the middle of winter. I had been having a bad run with a cold. I was having a coughing fit and that’s when it happened, I coughed up blood. I yelled out to my father he came rushing into my room, that’s when I showed him the blood.
Now, by this time I was coughing more and more and started to panic. My heart was racing, my mind was overflowing, I was sure that I was about to die. My dad coached me to stay calm and slow my breathing down so I wouldn’t be pumping so much blood. He rushed me to the hospital all while he was calm and never showed signs that he too was in a panic. Some hours had passed, it was later in the night and I had just woken up from a small sleep; the loss of so much blood tends to make you want to pass out.
It was around two in the morning and I remember looking at my phone. A nurse had just walked in to check on me, we were in the middle of talking when it happened, I coughed and then I tasted blood in the back of my throat. The nurse handed me the bowl, I spat it out, a blood clot that was black then the coughing fit started.
I reached for my phone to call my father who had gone home some hours ago. The phone rang once, he answered, and all I said was “dad help” before I blacked out from the loss of blood.
It was the next day when I woke to find my father sitting beside my bed. He looked at me with relief on his face. As he spoke to me all the time remaining calm as ever, my father knew that if he showed any signs of fear or worry then I would then start to worry myself.
My father, with his infinite wisdom, then took it upon himself to teach me the art of meditation to help me slow my mind and body just in case this situation happened again. In the many years since that time in my young life, I have had multiple bleeds in the chest, but I always think about what I was taught, from the doctors, the nurses and my father.
Now having a bleed from the chest can be a very scary thing at first, but the best thing to do is not to panic and to remain calm. If you have a plan of action for such a situation, then act on that and then contact your CF team and let them know what has happened. In the case of a more severe bleed, do not hesitate to call an ambulance or go to the E.D. Doing this alone does not have to be the option.
My hope is that one day we find a cure for this illness and no one has to suffer as some of us have had to.
“Massive haemoptysis occurs in a minority of patients with cystic fibrosis, with an annual incidence of 1%. Embolisation in this group is reported to have over 73% success in ceasing haemoptysis” (An Interventionalist’s Guide to Hemoptysis in Cystic Fibrosis, 2018).
For more information about haemoptysis, please have a read of our factsheet. If any of this information causes distress or you wish to talk to someone, please contact our social worker Kathryn on servicesmanagers@cfwa.org.au or 08 6224 4100.