A brief break from the gratitude posts.
A Year Ago Today
December 2, 2013 was a Monday. We’d bought pizza for dinner since Mondays can be such a hassle and we watched an episode of MythBusters on Netflix in the basement. We hadn’t done that for ages; it was fun and reminded me of when the kids were little and we’d all pile into the basement on Friday nights for movies. I miss that now that they are older and we do it less frequently since they have other engagements and interests to tend to.
After dinner, I came upstairs with my dishes. The Buddhist was remaining in the basement to play a video game with the kids. I’m not much of a gamer, so I was heading up to entertain myself on the interwebs. I realized I’d forgotten my iPad and went back down and retrieved it. As I started to climb back up the stairs, I started feeling… wrong. I’d had the same feeling earlier in the day when I’d gone to the post office – a kind of burning pain in the left side of my chest. I’d assumed in the afternoon that it was just from breathing the cold outside air and maybe I was getting a chest cold or something. Still, it hurt so badly that when I got home, I lied down for a couple hours. By dinner, I’d felt okay.
If climbing the 7 steps from the basement to the first floor felt wrong, taking the next flight up to my bedroom felt scary wrong. I was sweating profusely and my chest was on fire. My left arm felt like I’d seriously injured my bicep or something. By the time I made it to the bedroom, I kinda flopped face-first on to my bed. Only for a moment, though; I was back up an instant later, stumbling to the bathroom and throwing up. This was weird. I staggered back into the bedroom and collapsed facedown in a crumpled pile, looking like one of those babies that falls asleep mid-crawl, except not cute.
Something was telling me “you’re having a heart attack, idiot,” but that was absurd. It had to be something else. I couldn’t be having a heart attack. I was 43. A non-smoker. A teetotaller. A label-reading vegetarian. It had to be something else.
I lay there briefly, considering my options. I really, really did not want to go to the hospital. I have such a great aversion to doctors that I have been known to perform minor at-home surgery. Don’t look at me like that. My dad, my mom and my brother have all performed home dentistry with no ill effects. It’s not that crazy.
Back to doctors. I know some charming and lovely individuals in the medical field. As a profession, though… they’re mostly just guessing, right? Educated guessing, but still guessing. And for the majority of ailments, you really do simply get better after enough time passes. Either that or you die, but dying’s unlikely. Anyway, even though my former GP admitted the guessing business to me, I know my argument is a losing battle – particularly now that having gone to see a doctor actually saved my life and everything. But this gives you an idea of the kind of option-weighing I was doing, crumpled facedown on my bed.
It was surely heartburn. I would go to the hospital and they would tell me to take an antacid and stop being a drama queen. I have gone to the doctor, even the hospital, before and more times than not I left with no more information or insight than when I arrived, but with 6 hours of my life gone and a bill for $2,000.
Still, this felt pretty important. It was a strange pain and not subsiding on its own. I decided to ask my husband what he thought. It dawned on me that my condition was pretty serious when I realized I couldn’t picture making it down to the basement to fetch him. I couldn’t even picture standing up. I looked around for some way to try to summon him without moving. I settled on grabbing the fan next to my bed and banging it against the floor a few times. A crude communication system, but effective.
The Buddhist didn’t really know what to do either, but we fairly quickly decided an ER trip was warranted. At 9:00pm, I listened to him call 911 for an ambulance. His voice when he was talking to the dispatch operator was heartbreaking. I hated how scared he sounded. They advised him to give me an aspirin to chew and asked a bunch of questions. Still crumpled facedown on the bed, I heard The Buddhist call our son upstairs and tell him to go unlock the door because an ambulance was on its way. The EMTs got me downstairs and I remember seeing my daughter standing in the dining room. The only thing I could think of was that I didn’t want her to be scared. I tried to smile and told her everything was fine. I needed to go to see a doctor because I was feeling poorly, but I would be back later tonight. Everything was cool. I’d see her in a little while. I didn’t see my son on the way out. It may be because I had tunnel vision by that point, but I think he was probably trying to stay out of the way.
The ambulance was very bright inside. And it was uncomfortable because the pain in my chest and arm persisted. Curling up in a ball seemed like the most natural thing to do, but I had to lie flat on the gurney while the EMT did a bunch of tests and readings of my vitals. She gave me a nitroglycerin tablet to dissolve under my tongue. It made a negligible difference to my chest pain, but instantly produced a headache. The ambulance ride was one of the bumpiest trips ever. It felt like the driver was totally off-roading it. Nonetheless, the EMT prepped me for an IV, placing a needle into a vein in the back of my hand, attaching an injection port and taping the whole business down so the ER could just plug in a saline drip or whatever medication I might need. All the nurses in the ER asked me who had done it because it was badly placed for their purposes; it was kind of in the way. They started another IV line in my other arm and primarily used that one.
My husband, who had followed the ambulance in our car after getting the kids settled in for the evening, arrived at the ER pretty quickly. I was very happy to see him. All these people kept asking me a million questions. I felt better with him there and he was able to handle all the paperwork and answer inquiries about what I’d been doing prior to coming there and such. I had an aching pain on the back of my left shoulder and he gently rubbed it while all the hullaballoo was going on. They drew some blood and took my blood pressure. It was normal. Temperature: normal enough. They did an EKG – also normal. Aside from the fact that I was distressed, non-stop clutching my chest, and reporting pain, I was not outwardly symptomatic.
In fact, it was becoming clear that the ER folks were preparing to send me home. I’d expected as much, but it was dismaying because I will still suffering. A cardiologist came by to ask me questions. When he heard about my family history, he decided to keep me a little longer to check one more thing. Both my parents have had heart problems. Between them they’ve had high blood pressure and cholesterol, several heart attacks, open-heart surgery, multiple angioplasties and stents, and a defibrillator implant (like a back-up generator that jump starts your heart if it’s misbehaving). The doctor said he did not believe I’d had a heart attack, but he had blood drawn to see if it contained creatine kinase, an enzyme that is released when heart tissue is damaged. To see what’s going on inside in real-time, you take one blood sample and then another a couple hours later and compare. If the amount of the enzyme present increases between the first test and the second, you’ve recently had or are currently having a heart attack.
I was admitted to the hospital since I would be there a few hours more for the tests. The Buddhist came to my room with me and saw me settled in, but I told him he should go home after that. By this time it was 3 or 4am. He was going to get a couple hours of sleep, get the kids off to school, then come back. I wanted him to rest, but I was bummed when he left. I was still in so much pain and the room was creepy. The whole ward was middle-of-the-night spooky. I sat there and started to get weepy, but then a very brusque doctor came in. I’d become fairly used to having strangers uncover my half nekked body by this point to poke at me and listen to my chest. What was unusual about Dr. Brusque was that she didn’t even bother to pull the little privacy curtain when she was doing it. Then she just mumbled and left, leaving the door wide open and me totally exposed. Pretty much immediately some guy walked down the hall and looked into the room in the way you do when you’re wandering around the hospital looking for someone. Great. I couldn’t even cover myself properly because of all the IVs restricting my use of my hands. Thanks, Doc!
I eventually managed to get the attention of a nurse to let her know I was in pain and needed some help with my hospital gown. Or I thought I’d got her attention. Really she was coming down anyway to tell me I was being moved. I’d only been in the ward a few minutes but I was happy to be leaving. They’d done a comparison between my-arriving-at-the-ER blood results and my let’s-look-at-the-enzyme blood results and there was a huge difference. I was being taken to the ICU. The ICU was like a 5 star spa. There was a crowd of nurses around me, each efficiently taking care of various readings and comforts. It seems that every unit doesn’t trust the last one’s IV lines, so I got a set of new lines and injection ports. I was hooked up to a whole bunch of beeping, chirping machines. I kinda loved the ICU. The team there was so friendly and professional and proficient at their jobs. They also gave me morphine. Lots and lots of beautiful morphine. It never made the pain entirely go away, but every 15-30 minutes, they gave me a bit more so the pain was more tolerable and I was so much more comfortable. ICU rocked.
By 5am, they’d taken yet another enzyme test and the reading was even higher. I was told that in the morning, I’d be given a cardiac catheterization so they could look inside my heart and see what was going on. Shift change took place at 7am and my new nurse was very different than the sweet girl who’d been checking in and chatting with me all night. I was very tired and frustrated by this time and very, very thirsty. I had not been allowed to drink – even ice chips – since I arrived at the hospital shortly after 9pm the previous night. I was crying when Nurse Grumpy first entered. Using the bedside manner of a WWF wrestling coach, he introduced himself by barking “Crying’s not going to change anything.” He then left the room.
Well, it did get me to stop crying. I was furious. I typically am very low key and diplomatic, but this guy’s aggressive tone really mashed my buttons. When he came back in, I told him I thought he had a terrible way of interacting with patients. Who walks into the ICU room of a crying patient and yells at them? He said he knew I was scared, but crying wasn’t going to make anything better. So… not only rude, but unrepentant. I seethed, “I’m not a fucking idiot. Of course crying isn’t going to change anything. And I am not scared, I am crying because I am so incredibly thirsty. Get me a fucking drink.”
His expression, but not his tone, changed considerably. “Do you even know what is happening to you?” I realized that no, no one had actually told me what was going on other than I was getting a test in a while.
Him: “You’re having a heart attack. A really big heart attack in the absolute worst artery possible.”
Me: “You mean like right now I am having a heart attack?”
Him: “Yes, it started last night. You have blockage in your LAD artery. That’s the bad one.”
Well that shut me up. I don’t really know what I thought had been happening, but that cardiologist had said he really didn’t think it was a heart attack, so I’d put it out of my mind.
I was having a heart attack. How completely bizarre.
Nurse Not-as-Grumpy-Anymore brought me a couple ice chips. I accepted them as an olive branch and a symbol of our new truce. I texted my husband that it turns out I was having a heart attack and could he please come over. He was already at the hospital, trying to get someone to let him in the ICU. Not long after, he gained entry and I saw him briefly before I went to the Cath Lab for the surgery.
You are not put under when you have this kind of procedure, so I listened to the doctors as they talked. I did, indeed, have blockage in my LAD artery – 100% blockage. Also 30-40% blockage in other arteries, but they don’t bother to fix those unless they’re over 70% blocked. The doctor did a thrombectomy to remove the blockage and then implanted two metal stents in my heart to keep the artery open. I remember being amused because the doctor was so pleased with himself that he got the blockage out all in one piece that he called someone in from the hall to show it to them.
I had to lie completely flat without moving for many, many hours. A very sweet man whose job was to place a constant 10 pounds of pressure on the insertion point in my femoral artery for 30 minutes came in and did so. They used to use sandbags for this and just left them on for 6 hours, but the hospital found the human pressure a better method. It was the single most painful experience of my life. When he was done, I had to remain still for several more hours. 3am was the magic time when the pilot would turn off the seatbelt lights and I could get up and move about the cabin – with assistance. I wheedled and cajoled, I used my best trial advocacy skills, but my nurse would not let me sit up early.
She was very kind, though. Shifts had changed and I had Nurse Sweetiepie back again. I’d become obsessed with taking a shower. I felt like I had been in the hospital for weeks and really wanted to feel clean. At the stroke of 3am, she entered my room with a big pile of supplies. I wasn’t allowed to take a shower, but she brought me a toothbrush and toothpaste, a comb, deodorant, and a beautiful variety of washcloths and cleansers. She rigged my IVs so I could walk the few feet to the bathroom and she stood outside the whole time since I was a falling risk. When I finished my amazingly welcome bath, Sweetiepie then brought me a big, ice-cold cup of apple juice. And graham crackers. Those 3 things – getting clean, having a drink and a snack at 3am – felt like the kindest gifts anyone had ever given me in my entire life.
