Continued……….I managed supper and staying awake until the girls went to sleep and then I succumbed to the bone weariness that I felt.

                   Around the same time as the previous night I was awakened with this meddlesome attack of heartburn. Again it was persistent, so I rolled out of bed to walk it off, get a drink of water and wait for it to subside as it had the previous evening. After getting my drink I got as far as the entry to the living room before it hit me. The pain felt like a spike had been driven into my heart and it incapacitated me. This was not normal and finally my brain clicked (danger Will Robinson danger) and I knew something was terribly wrong. Duh!! I literally fell to my knees trying to call out to my husband but I couldn’t breathe enough air in to push a sound out. The pressure I felt on my chest was choking me and the most intense pain filled my entire upper body. For the life of me all I could do was stay conscious.

                   I knew I had to move and the thought of my family finding me in the morning was what propelled me forward. I crawled down the hall to our bedroom and woke my husband by grabbing his arm in a death grip. Digging my always too long nails into it for all I was worth. This seemed to be substantial according to the markings left on his arm. To say the least he was a little put out and because I couldn’t talk there was a bit of confusion as to why I had chosen this particular avenue to wake him up. I was just trying to breathe. And then I felt the need to empty the contents of my stomach so I instinctively crawled into the bathroom to visit John, wouldn’t want to leave a mess now would I.  When I got there my bowels were also trying to get my attention. It quickly turned into an urgent need to assess just what was going to happen first. It turned out it didn’t matter because by that time I was not in control of the outcome. As unpleasant as the whole procedure was it turned out to be a good thing. I could finally breathe again and the pain receded enough that I could tell my husband that I needed to go to the hospital. I know your thinking “why didn’t you call an ambulance” and it is a perfectly logical question. However, we lived in a small village forty five minutes out of the city with the nearest corner store four miles away and our expectation was that he would get there faster than they could get to me.  Yes, it seems idiotic now, I could have used a hit of oxygen,  but we did what came naturally to us. This was to take care of things ourselves. Yes, I agree, that is a sad state of affairs. Unbelievably, it still hadn’t occurred to me that my heart was the problem. Or it had and I was denying it for all I was worth.

                   When my husband finally realized that the situation was dire he propelled himself into action. This was difficult for him because the word “hurry” was not in his copy of the dictionary. And he was not doing well keeping himself calm and in control of the situation. So I diverted my thoughts into giving him direction in what should be done next. He managed to get the kids up and dressed. Carrie had to go to school in “dad clothes” that day poor child. I don’t remember getting myself dressed or how I got to the car but once I was there my memory picks up again. We dropped the kids off at his mothers around the corner (yes, his whole fam-damily lived within two miles of us) and were on our way to the city. Things were heating up and he was driving like a mad man. It didn’t seem like the right time to criticize him for it so I put the zipper on my mouth. Not that I felt like talking anyway. I had others things to deal with. I remember thinking that if the police tried to pull us over there was no way my husband was going to stop for them. As always my imagination took over. They would have to follow us. This would call for the sirens and flashing light. A police escort did not seem like a bad thing at this point.  Surely because of the circumstances they would see fit to overlook it just this one time. Or they would run us off the road and that would be the end of that.

                   Once we reached the city limits yellow lights meant go faster, as my four year old Grand Daughter expressed the last time I had them in the car. After all it was four o’clock in the morning (I had already been dealing with the issue for two hours) and the streets were pretty much deserted. Not to mention that my husband’s foot was stuck to the gas pedal. Our luck lasted and the police did not appear. I peeked over and my husband was looking quite ashen and I could feel the fear starting to envelope him. He looked at me like he was looking at a ghost because, unknown to me I was so pale at that time I looked like one.

                   I did my best trying to appear better than I felt and probably failed miserably. If a person can will something to happen then I did that night. The one single thought that if I could just make it to the hospital everything would be fine kept me from passing out and focused enough that my husband was not left alone in this journey.  And I did make it, fool that I am I even walked into the emergency room. But when I stepped up to the little emergency window and saw all those cute nurses in their white uniforms I gave way to my body.  I have no recollection of how I got undressed and in a hospital bed.

Continued…….

                                      Quotation:

“Courage is not the absence of fear but the mastery of it.”

                                   (Author: Mark Twain)

          

Tags: atrial ventricular, ejection fraction, Heart Disease, Heart Failure, icd, left coronary artery, tachycardia, wide complex

This entry was posted by Debbie on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 12:24 PM and is filed under My Heart Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.