When I went to the hospital, folks were really vague and uncommunicative about what was wrong with me. I’d been in the ICU for almost 10 hours when a nurse who I was pretty much disobeying asked, “Do you even understand what’s happening here? You’re having a heart attack. You know that, right?”
I was stunned. No one had mentioned that; in fact, the cardiologist I had seen hours earlier had explicitly said he didn’t think it was a heart attack. I can’t really blame him – throughout the entire thing, my blood pressure was its normal healthy 120/80 and my EKG read as if nothing unusual was going on. It was only the blood tests that made it clear.
When your heart tissue is damaged or dying, it releases certain enzymes. When those enzymes are floating around in your blood, it signifies that your heart muscle has been damaged, presumably by a recent heart attack. If the amount of those enzymes increases over the course of a series of blood tests, it signifies that you are having a heart attack right now. So they weren’t being mean or hiding it from me most of my time there, they just were doing the tests. The lab results clued them in. Well, that and the fact that despite giving me morphine shots and nitroglycerine what seemed like every half hour, I was still curled up in a ball, clutching my chest and wincing for the duration of the overnight nursing staff’s shift.
Not knowing I was having a heart attack contributed significantly to my lack of fear during the 12 hours between calling the ambulance and going into surgery. Not knowing it was a Widowmaker continued my ignorant fearlessness all the way through discharge a few days later. Plus, I never lost consciousness. For some reason it didn’t feel like it could be that serious if I was awake the whole time. Additionally, I may just be really stupid.
Once I got home and really started to process what had happened, the fear set in. Reading articles about the Widowmaker were chilling. One stated that only 3% -10% of those who suffer one survive. Another set the survival rate at 20%, assuming you got immediate medical attention. If I’d followed my normal habit of avoiding doctors and hospitals at all costs, I would have died.
Once something happens – or nearly happens, it suddenly becomes possible in your head. Now that I realize how close I came to dying, I realize it’s possible. I could actually die. It’s kind of funny – the whole time I was at some risk of imminent death, I didn’t think of it once; yet now that I am home, I think of little else. I’m hoping it’s just one of those stages of grief kind of things that will pass, but right about now, I’m afraid of everything.
