That Time Google Saved My Life

We’ve all done it: You come down with some common ailment, Google the symptoms, and are shocked to discover that you could have cancer or some other terrible problem. So the advice is simple: Don’t self-diagnose. But here’s the thing: One time, I did do so, and Google saved my life.

Seriously.

In late February 2005, I traveled to Breckenridge, Colorado with my friend Chris for a long weekend of skiing. I’ve been visiting Colorado’s ski country since the early 1980’s—my dad has owned a place near Durango’s Purgatory ski area for over 30 years—so I have decades of experience at altitude.

I wasn’t sick when I left for Colorado, but when I arrived in Breckenridge, I started getting pounding headaches and was always exhausted. No worries, I thought: That’s what happens sometimes when you adjust to high altitude. I’ll just drink lots of liquids and suck it up. No need to ruin the weekend.

And so we skied. I took a couple of pictures from the top of the mountain, tried to deal with my pounding headache, my aching body, and my difficulty breathing. And then I eventually gave up: On the second day, I told Chris I needed to stay in the room, and he headed off to the mountain, confused. I crashed.

That night we headed out for dinner, but I felt even worse. I have a strange memory of walking down the street, trailing Chris, and trying to listen to what he was saying but not understanding him, of not hearing him and then hearing him again. By the time I went to bed, I had a raging fever. I put a cold, wet facecloth on my forehead and went to bed, thinking that if I just made it through the night, I’d be fine. We could just fly home, and I’d be away from the altitude.

When I woke up, the facecloth was both dry and hot, and I figured it was early morning. Nope: It was just an hour or two later, it was the middle of the night, and I was not OK. So I crawled out of bed, grabbed my laptop, and laid down on the bathroom floor in the dark. And I started Googling.

What I saw wasn’t good. My basic symptoms—fatigue, breathlessness, headache, fever—indicated basic altitude sickness. This happens all the time, and is common. But I was worse than that: I had sort of blacked out walking to dinner, had experienced confusion at Chris’ words.

I seemed to be suffering from one of two things. High-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), from which I could recover if I acted on it quickly enough. Or High-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), which was even worse.

So I called the front desk at the hotel an inquired about an in-house doctor. Nope. I was told to call the local hospital, called the Breckenridge Medical Center. I will never forget that conversation.

I described my symptoms and was told I needed to come in immediately. Do not wait for the morning, I was told. Can someone drive me there? Yes. No, seriously, I was told: Do not drive yourself. Is there someone else who can drive you? If not, they would send an ambulance. Yes, I replied. I’ll be right there.

And then I had that awkward moment where I woke up Chris, who to that point was convinced I was just handling a common illness poorly. And asked him to drive me to the hospital. At roughly 1 a.m.

Chris is a great guy. He was confused. But he did so without complaint.

“The patient is visiting from Boston,” a report typed at 3:16 am reads. “He has had shortness of breath, worse with activity. During the past 24 hours, he has developed a nonproductive cough, progressive headache, and intermittent fever symptoms. Mild intermittent nausea. Chest X-ray: Diffuse, moderate interstitial changes consistent with HAPE. Diagnosis: High-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE).”

The level of oxygen in my blood was 60 percent. 95 to 100 percent is normal. Under 90 is considered low. And 60 is the point at which the lack of oxygen in the blood becomes fatal.

Once I was on oxygen in the hospital, I immediately shot to 95 percent and felt much better. Off oxygen, it plunged back down to the 60s. So I spent the night, on oxygen, and Chris headed back to the hotel.

The next morning, I met with a doctor who looked at my chart and whistled. “I’ve been here for a long time,” he said, “and I’ve only seen one oxygen reading lower than yours. And that guy died.”

Great.

Long story short, I spent the next three days slowly making my way down from altitude. HAPE is uncommon, in that only 1 percent of people at altitude ever experience it, and it has nothing to do with physical fitness or one’s experience with high-altitude environments. In fact, it’s most common with mountain climbers. But one of the mistakes people made early on with HAPE, before it was well-understood, is that they’d get sick and immediately go down to a lower altitude, convinced that would “cure” them. More often than not, it killed them.

That would probably have happened to me, I was told: If I had just gone home, had driven off the mountain, I could have died. I had swung past the point of no return.

So I had two goals: Get off the mountain in a measured way. And figure out whether I’d need to be on oxygen for the rest of my life. The good news? I started responding correctly as I headed towards Denver a few days later. And by the time I checked in at a hospital there a few days later—and was pushed right to the front of the line in the Emergency Room because of my listed condition—it seemed that I’d be OK without the oxygen tanks I’d been carting around for the past few days. (Imagine, if you will, driving down from a mountain in a rental car with an oxygen mask on your face and an O2 tank on the floor next to you.)

Two final bits from this trip. First, my final night in Colorado at a hotel outside the airport, knowing that my final supply of O2 would run out in the middle of the night as I slept. I was told in Denver I’d be fine, and that all I had by this point was pneumonia. But naturally my mind wandered to thoughts of not waking up, and being found in a hotel by the Denver airport. What a way to go.

And then my final hurdle. As it turns out, you can drop off O2 tanks (and probably any medical equipment) at any check-in counter at the airport—who knew?—but in doing so, the airline representative looked at me suspiciously. Why did I even need those tanks? Oh, I came down with HAPE while skiing. And why would we let you on this plane? You could be a danger to others if you stop breathing.

This was unexpected.

I sort of felt like I was going to be fine, and that flying would not be an issue. Planes are pressurized to 8,000 feet maximum, which is still within the normal, sea-level range. And while I was advised to take Diamox whenever I traveled to high altitudes (10,000 feet or more) in the future—once you get HAPE, you are thought to be more likely to get it again in the future, supposedly—I would never need that to fly.

Fortunately, I had literally one inch of paperwork. So I pulled it out and showed her how I had HAPE on whatever day, how things had improved a few days later and how, on the day before, I was proven to have beaten the HAPE. “When you think about it, ” I said, suddenly very sure of myself, “I’m the only one on this plane who was literally given a clean bill of health. I’m ready to go.”

She bought it. And I flew home, and was fine. Still am, though I feel like I stared directly at the thing that will one day probably get me unless there’s a bus out there with my name on it.

The moral to this story? I’m not suggesting that you always Google your symptoms and then act on what you read. But given my previous experience, doing a bit of research isn’t a bad idea. Just be sure to follow-up with a doctor. Because, seriously, it may just save your life.