Zach J. Payne, a playwright living in Pennsylvania, had severe edema in his legs that left doctors at a loss until a doctor correctly diagnosed “flooding” in his kidneys and saved his life by draining water.
Mr. Payne said that one day he had to drive to an appointment with a weight-loss doctor, get in the driver’s seat and find that he couldn’t step on the pedal in any way. He pushed the seat forward as far as he could, his stomach stuck to the steering wheel, but still couldn’t. His legs were swollen, he realized.
He went to the emergency room and the nurse took his blood pressure, which was alarmingly high: 240/110. For the past few months, he has been taking blood pressure lowering drugs because of high blood pressure and obesity. Meanwhile, he has been working with a weight loss doctor to lose weight, with good results. Before he lost weight, he had to go back to his home on the second floor every few steps and had to stop to rest. After several months, he lost more than 10kg. He still gasped when climbing the stairs, but he didn’t have to stop.
Over the next three months, he saw many doctors. Every doctor was frightened by his blood pressure, but he was more worried about his swollen leg than his blood pressure. He could hardly walk, and for some days, he could barely move.
Some doctors asked him to wear spandex pants, which did help, but it soon came back. Most doctors say they can’t figure out the cause and have to keep an eye on it. Over the course of a few months, “my mobility went from a bit of a problem to almost zero. I couldn’t put my pants on, I couldn’t put my shoes on, I couldn’t even put my slippers on, I couldn’t even lift my legs into the bathroom, and there were times when my knees didn’t bend at all.”
Nothing the doctor prescribed or advised him to do was of any use.
Until one day, his junior health care doctor suggested that he see a doctor in his small town who evaluated the poles, and he quickly made an appointment to see him in three days’ time, the fastest pace in America.
As soon as the doctor saw him, he said, “I can see you’re carrying 30 to 40 pounds of water.”
“I was freaking out. I had the equivalent of five extra bottles of milk pulling me down? It was crazy.” Mr Payne said.
The first thing the doctor did, ignoring Payne’s excess weight and high blood pressure, was to deal with the water that flooded his body.
“If you were my in-patient, I could drain this excess water out of your body in two days, but you’d have to use a catheter or you’d have to run to the bathroom,” he told Payne. He did not put PAM in hospital, but he decided to check PAM’s drug list.
Payne took more medicine than most people put together. The doctor cut almost all of his pills, gave him two diuretics and asked him to draw blood a week later to check the condition of his kidneys. “A kidney? I don’t know what a kidney is for. I can do without a kidney, but I can’t do without legs.” Payne wondered.
That night, Payne couldn’t sleep because he ran to the bathroom every hour to urinate. “Literally, every hour,” he said.
After two days of taking the medicine, his legs have become significantly smaller. About a week later, most of the swelling had gone down. “Everyone was surprised to see me and I felt more comfortable than I had in three months. I could walk easily, I could walk all the way up the stairs without having to rest.”
Until then, Payne said, he never knew, “Water could make me float or it could kill me.”
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