World on it´s head .... part 1

You never believe it will happen to you.  Until it does.  And when it does, your world turns upside down on it´s head and things are never really the same again.

39 years old, still with a bit of pregnancy chubbiness, but overall fairly healthy.  Since the age of 16 I hadn´t touched any form of meat.  I hadn´t smoked or drank in years.  With 2 young children, one of which was 1.5 years old, those days were long gone.  So I was pretty much just doing my job of being a mom.  And that´s exactly what I was doing, being a mom, putting the washing away, when I felt a sharp stab in my chest.  I quickly ran to sit down.  After 5 minutes the pain subsided, but I knew straight away that this was something out of the ordinary.

Facing the doctor a few hours later, he told me it wasn´t my heart (thank goodness!) and he wanted to send me to a neurologist.  He sent me off with a smile and a bottle of nitro, and said to call an ambulance should I have the pain again.

3am, 3 days later, I woke up next to my babies, heaving for breath.  The most prominent pain was a throbbing down my esophagus. Otherwise it was all the text book pain - searing chest, jaw  and arms.  I was still able to get up, so I ran for the nitro and told my husband to call an ambulance.

I was able to walk to the ambulance, which placated the medics for a while.  I don´t know what was going on, but I sat in that ambulance for over an hour before we left.  In that time they had given me pain medication and done several EKG´s, with not much indication of what was happening.  They didn´t seem overly concerned.  I remember lying there burping and yawning constantly - because of lack of oxygen in my body.

2 hours later, we arrived at the hospital, and they wheeled me straight into the emergency surgery.  I was in so much shock and pain, and so intensely confused, I felt like I was in some kind of strange dream.  

There was a massive monitor on my left, a huge looming machine above my head, and in stark contrast, and adding to the weirdness of the situation, the radio was playing something upbeat in the background.  I remember the nurse asking if she could cut my clothes off.  Go ahead... Then came a healthy dose of morphine.  I heaved a sigh as it leaked through my body and took my pain with it.  I could think again.

Next, came a burning pain in my wrist as they shot the contrast medium into the main artery of my right arm.  It burned all the way up.  That was the last physical pain I had as they sent the tube up my arm.

There was this intensely strange feeling as I felt the tube take a right through my shoulder, go straight ahead, and enter my heart.  I felt every movement right there inside my heart.

The machine that loomed and glared at me from above came down to clamp my head to the left.  I lay as still as I could and felt as they moved around in, what I would later learn, was my LAD artery.

I still had no idea what had happened.  When I saw my heart come up on the big tv screen in front of me, it was all too much and for the first time wondered if I was going to die.  I wept for my babies and for myself.  I   wasn´t ready.  The nurse was very kind and spoke to me for a while.  Asked me questions about my kids to divert my attention for a few minutes.

The heart catheter felt like it took hours, but it could have just as easily have been minutes.  

They wheeled me out and the surgeon, who struck me as being really young, told me I had just had a heart attack, and he had just inserted 3 stents to save my life.

These things don´t really compute at first, and I just glared at him.  He said he couldn´t see a clear cause for the attack, but I should eat healthily and lose weight.  Thanks.  My blood pressure and cholesterol levels were elevated from the attack, but were not the cause of it.

A week in hospital and I was pricked, prodded and guinea pigged with vast amounts of different medication - some of which made me feint - causing hysteria - some made my entire body burn and some gave me the worst headache I had ever experienced.  

Eventually we got the recipe right, and I was sent home. Boom bam. Enjoy your life.

Now, at first, I found it very disturbing not to know why this had happened to me, or what I could do to prevent another occurrence.  

But the machines never lie, no never, and they told the doctors that my heart was now fine.