It hurts.
But it didn't hurt nearly as much as I would have thought.
Less than when I broke my ankle.
About the same as a bad kidney stone.
For me it started at about lunchtime on a Friday. Some background information.
I'm American but I live in the Czech Republic. My girlfriend is Czech.
I was at home all day looking after my then one-year-old.
Here's a picture of him around that time:
Cutie-pie eh?
His mother was 200 miles away attending an 8 hour course on translating.
In the movies, heart attacks happen with a sharp pain in the upper left side of a person's chest. There are shooting pains down the left arm. The person suffering from it grabs his chest and gasps, staggering back. The pain is intense. Then he collapses. It's a trope.
It was different with me.
I felt a rather strong pain in my upper back, on the right side. It left me gasping a little.
I probably would have gone to the hospital but I was looking after my son and didn't know who to call to look after him.
After awhile the pain faded.
I told myself if I felt the same pain the next day, I was going to go to the hospital.
_________________________
The next day was sunny. IN fact it was the first sunny and warm day there had been that winter, which had reached unusually cold temperatures--getting down to minus 40 at nights for over two weeks.
So when the sunshine broke out on March 17th, and temperature soared to 19° Celsius, my girlfriend and I decided to take a short walk around our neighbourhood with my little son.
But I didn't feel well.
I can't really explain it. I just felt generally crappy. Sort of like you feel when you've eaten too much--only I wasn't full.
It felt...unhealthy. After walking a hundred yards or so, I told my girlfriend that I wasn't feeling well.
I went home and rested awhile and then I made myself lunch.
I had recently put myself on a low carbohydrate, high fat diet at that point to try to lose weight. The diet had worked for me before so i was trying again. I had lost 4 kilos in 4 days!! Yay! Then I had a heart attack.
Boo.
So I stuffed myself with chicken breast and cheese fried in olive oil. After that the pain I had felt again came back.
Again, it was concentrated in my left shoulder blade.
One time when I was in elementary school in St. Louis, I was eating lunch cooked by the cafeteria. ON the menu was mashed potatoes. And those were the hottest mashed potatoes that I've ever eaten. Over-heated. Like they would have melted lead.
I took a bite. As it went down my esophagus, the heat caused a sharp, unbearable pain in my mid section, deep down. Maybe you've experienced something like that?
That's how it felt.
Anyway, feeling the pain, I went upstairs to lay down. My son was put to rest in the baby cot next to our bed.
I laid for a while, breathing deeply, willing myself to relax but the pain didn't go away. It got a little worse, even.
Then I started feeling queasy.
And I suddenly knew. I was having a heart attack.
A friend of mine had died of a heart attack only a few months before and I remember I had looked up the symptoms of heart attack at that time, and read a whole bunch of unusual symptoms.
It often doesn't happen in the classic Hollywood way.
Some people feel pain in their backs. In their stomachs. In their necks. In their groins. In their arms. In their chins. Some just feel queasy. There's a whole rainbow of crappy things people feel. Look it up.
I felt it in my left shoulder-blade.
I went downstairs to the toilet in case I would vomit. I didn't.
I sat down at the computer in the kitchen. I was going to google 'symptoms of heart attack', like I had when my friend died.
Then I remembered reading that 'you would not believe how many people who are having heart attacks sit down and google symptoms of heart attack before going to teh hospital. Don't do that. GET TO THE HOSPITAL IMMEDIATELY.'
So instead of typing the command into Google, I turned to my girlfriend who was ironing or something and told her:
'I think I'm having a heart attack.'
And she said "What do you want me to do about it? I've just put Lukaš to bed."
She thought I was being overdramatic. I was, after all, only 41.
I gritted my teeth, getting angry:"I want you to get Lukaš up and take me to the hospital!!!
Stay calm. If you're really having a heart attack, you need to stay calm, I thought.
Because, honestly, there was part of me that was beginning to panic.
We should have called an ambulance.But I can't really express how much in denial my girlfriend was. I wasn't in denial. But I was ready to go along with it because I really didn't want to be having a heart attack. IN a moment like that you try to be in denial.
15 minutes later we were on the road to the hospital.
On the way, my right arm and the tips of all ten fingers started going numb. Great, they're not getting enough oxygen, I thought..
The pain wasn't increasing but it was holding steady.
When we got to the hospital my girlfriend took me straight to...neurology.
WE told the doctor my symptoms and she had me stand up and do things like touch my nose and say the alphabet. She held her finger in front of my face and had me follow it with my yes.
She said she didn't know what the problem was but told me to go to cardiology just in case it actually was a heart attack and then come back and she'd do some tests.
On the way to neurology the pain increased. Walking increased it.
Well, duh, because walking makes your heart work harder.
In the cardiology department they took us in immediately. I stripped off my shirt and the nurse did an ECG. The report printed up. The nurse took a look at it, and without a word left the room.
That wasn't a good sign.
A short time later, I was told to walk into the next office where the doctor their did an ultrasound on my heart. I could hear the heart beating on the speakers and see a fuzzy image of it working away on the monitor.
The doctor looked at it, his hand on my chest and, smiling, calmly, utterly nonchalantly, as sunnily as if he was observing the first roses of spring in bloom, he said "Infarkt tam je."
Which is Czech for You're having a heart attack.
My first thought was: I don't understand what he said.
I even thought it in Czech: Nerozumim!
After all, I'm not an expert on the Czech language. Oh, I get by in most situations. But I wouldn't feel comfortable comparing, say Kantian and Hegelian notions of governance or anything.
So, I mean, it was possible I misunderstood.
Right? Right?
That's what was going through my head.
The nurse gave me a handful of pills to swallow, which I did.
He called my girlfriend in, and with the same sunny manner with which he'd just spoken to me he said 'Yeah! He's having a heart attack.' Nodding and smiling. A benevolent blond angel who was built like a superhero. With a handsome chin like a sledge-hammer.
A dead ringer for this guy. Really. Sans mask.
My girlfriend said to him 'You're joking.'
'No no. He's definitely having a heart attack.' Big smile.
I live in a small town and the hospital here apparently is not really equipped to deal with this. So I was put on an ambulance.
I was supposed to have recorded a voice over for a project that my friend Steve was working on that day. I told my girlfriend to call my friend and tell him that I probably wasn't going to make it.
I'll never forget the ambulance door closing while I looked out at my girlfriend holding my son, and her stricken, horrified face. I gave her a thumbs up. I felt it best to be optimistic.
In the ambulance, I felt a big sense of calm. There was nothing I could do. It was totally out of my hands.
Sure there was a little corner of my mind that was panicking. Absolutely freaking out. It wasn't fair! I had a little boy! He needed a father!I was only 41! I was a little fat, sure but I hiked up mountains! I'd just bought a new car!!I hadn't even finished categorizing all the music I'd illlegally downloaded.
But 90 percent of my brain was calm.
And, annoyingly, this song kept going through my head.
It's a short song. Like 20 seconds long. So I got pretty sick of it quick! Because it wouldn't stop.
I remember looking at the unshaven face of the paramedic who was sitting next to me with a worried look on his face.
Oh, my God, I hope that this isn't the last sight I ever see, I thought.
WE got to a hospital that's about 30 kms away, over a mountain ridge. There they did a stint procedure. But it didn't work.
The doctor told me that it works in 95 percent of patients. But for some reason, in 5 percent of people, it doesn't work.
Great, so it's like I've won the lottery.
He then told me that they were going to take me to another hospital for surgery.
"is it dangerous? I asked.
A look of discomfort descended over the doctor's face.
'Um, er, ah, well, ah,I mean, that is, ah, er, YES.
But not having the operation is more dangerous." So I agreed.
.This hospital was about an hour and 20 minutes away. I would go by either ambulance or helicopter. Whichever was available first.
It was the ambulance. What a disappointment!
(All this time I still had the pain. It had lessened some but it kept doing its job.Part of the reason for the lessening of the pain have been the handful of pills I've swallowed, I reckoned. And part of that was the fact that I was totally, utterly relaxed. Because I felt like I had to be.And I'm a guy who gets stressed out. So that was quite a feat.)
It took about an hour, I guess to get to the next ambulance. A long boring hour.Out the window I saw the sky. Nothing else. I was bored.. Because I didn't really have a smart phone back then so I couldn't read Facebook or see if there had been any terrorist attacks or anything and I hadn't thought to bring my Ipod-like Sony Walkman.
And small talk with my ambulance companion just didn't feel appropriate.
Eventually, I got to the hospital--Svaty Anna in Brno-- and was wheeled through it. Lifted up stairs. Ceiling lights passing over my head.
Then, I was in the operating theatre and everybody was already ready.
A doctor bent over me.
"Should I speak Czech or English?"he said.
"We can try Czech, I need the practice." I replied.
He then told me that he was going to do bypass surgery and what it would involve. I didn't understand him. But what was I gonna do, demand a translator? Things were out of my hands.
I signed some forms.
I told the doctor that I was resistant to drugs and that in other surgical procedures I'd had(I broke my ankle in 2009) that I had actually woken up during the operation. Various doctors and nurses staring at me. Shocked look on their faces. My blood all over their hands.
'I do not want to wake up,' I told him.
"Well, wait! Wait! Let me clarify! I do want to wake up. It's just that I don't want to wake up in the middle of the operation. But I do want to wake up at some point. You know. AFTER the operation.'
He laughed. He assured me I would not wake up during the operation.
(In the short time we'd been talking a team was busy sticking various things in me and shaving the magnificent chest of hair I'd been cultivating for a couple of decades.)
The anaesthesiologist, a beautiful, dark-complected, big brown-eyed Slovak woman bent over me and told me to count backward from ten to one.
I started...."10...9..."
And woke up five days later.
No comments:
Post a Comment