Battles

“They had a good many COVID patients that were in much worse condition than I was and said that unless something else happened they wanted to send me home.”

Over the next few days he seemed to improve. He was able to work from home a few hours per day and felt optimistic that he had turned the corner. By Friday night, though, the intense coughing returned with a vengeance. In the wee hours of Saturday morning he was feeling intense pain in his back, under his scapula, and around his right rib cage. He thought he had pulled a rib from coughing. When his breathing became labored as it had on Monday, his wife took him back to the ER, where a CT scan showed he had a pulmonary embolism and pulmonary infarction of his right lung.

“I was very lucky that my complications weren’t worse. If I had never gone in and just pushed through the pain, another clot could have killed me.”

Blood thinners eventually treated the clots, though not without days and days of purple-hued legs. By

From his earliest days as a military police officer in Panama to stints in Afghanistan and Iraq, Col. John Cavedo, who commanded U.S. Army Cold Regions Test Center from 2009 to 2012, experienced his share of physical discomfort during more than three decades in the Army…little did he know he was about to face a scarring illness. (Photo by Mark Schauer)