My Own Mortality

Last Thursday I had quite a scare. About 12:30pm I started having terrible pain in my chest area. It was not on the left side. It was more in the middle, behind my sternum really. It just got worse and worse until I was just about seeing spots. I looked at the clock remember that I had read somewhere that you should worry if it goes on for more than 10 or 20 minutes. I ate a Mylanta-type pill and slipped into the ladies’ room hoping that would help but it just got worse. I got really scared that I might be having a heart attack. After all, I’m 51 years old. Until recently I was quite heavy. I smoked until 1987 and I did take Vioxx for a long period of time, so there was some reason to be concerned.

When I returned to my desk I looked at the clock and realized this pain had been going on for almost thirty minutes and was showing no signs of letting up. It vacillated between a level of 7-9 out of 10 (that’s what they always ask you where I go to the doctor) so I became even more frightened. I had a friend and co-worker some years ago whose had some chest pain and called the doctor. She waited for him to call back then, after several hours, decided to have her husband drive her to the hospital. She died on the way and she was only 55 years old. That weighs on me. On the other hand, I had another friend/co-worker who was around the same age who ran to the emergency room with chest pains only to discover it was gas pains, so you never know.

Anyway, I finally went to my boss. I was doubly concerned because the other assistant was on vacation last week and I had a stack of work a mile high on my desk so the whole thing was just really inconvenient. I told him that I knew it was inconvenient but that I was having terrible chest pains and I thought I needed to go to the doctor or call the doctor or something. I was so embarrassed. I know, on one hand, that it’s stupid to be embarrassed, but I can’t help it. I don’t like a lot of attention and certainly don’t want to be making a big fuss over nothing. On the other hand, I don’t want to be like my friend Marcia and die because I don’t do anything. My boss was wonderful, which sort of surprised me because I thought he’d be annoyed, but he called 911.

So the paramedics came and swept me into the ambulance and drove me to the emergency room. It was all so surrealistic. I’d never been in an ambulance as a patient before, only accompanying my children (my son’s low blood sugars and when my daughter got hit by a car once). My pulse was only 45 and my blood pressure was quite low. I guess my oxygen was low as well. They gave me baby aspirin but ended up not giving me nitroglycerin which I was kind of glad about because I’ve heard it causes migraine headaches. They put in an IV, a heart monitor, etc. It was very nerve wracking. I was in a sort of reclining position and looking out the back window I could see all the cars pulled over to let us by and felt creepy, part of me feeling guilty for making people pull over when there was probably nothing wrong with me and part of me scared to death that maybe something WAS actually very wrong with me.

In the emergency room the same basic stuff continued and they asked if my pulse and blood pressure were normally this low. I told them I really didn’t know but that I did believe they were low when I had my gall bladder surgery three weeks ago. They took blood and my medical history and finally the pain began to subside. By the time we got to the emergency room it had mellowed to about a level of 6. In the emergency room it started moving in waves of maybe 4-6, dropping down to 0 occasionally until it went away completely after several hours.

They told me they were going to admit me for the night because my heart needed to be monitored. I needed to have three blood tests done. The first was done immediately and had come back normal but a second would have to be done in six hours then a third would need to be done in the morning. These measured enzymes to see if there had been any heart damage. Additionally they were ordering an MRI of my heart with a stress test and that would be done the next day, again to check for heart damage to see if I’d suffered a heart attack. By this time I was feeling pretty normal so I was a little stunned. I figured they were going to tell me I was fine and send me packing!

I finally called my husband and let him know what was happening. Keep in mind this was the poor man’s first week at his new job. Of course they were fine with him leaving a little early and coming straight to the hospital, and my daughters went to the house and hung out with my son.

I spent an uneasy night in the hospital and asked the nurse why they were concerned… I had thought low blood pressure and a low resting pulse were signs of a healthy heart, not a sick one. She said that when they are THAT low they can sometimes be indicators of damage. She said the high blood pressure and high pulse are danger signs BEFORE something happens but after something happens, if there’s damage, then the pulse and pressure can get very low from the damage that may have been inflicted. I was reassured to know, however, that my second blood test came out negative (which was good). Apparently the first one can sometimes come out looking okay but the enzymes indicating damage won’t show up until the second test. When the second test comes out looking good, one can usually feel reassured.

The next day my third blood test came out fine then I just had to make it past the MRI and stress test as a final check for damage. That whole thing took about 2 ½ hours. The injected some sort of radioactive stuff into my IV then did an MRI of my heart, then I had to wait for awhile, then go on a treadmill for some time at a relaxed rate then at a tough rate. After that I had to wait a bit then have a longer MRI. I did quite well.

Apparently having lost all this weight, my resting pulse and blood pressure have dropped to very healthy rates, although 45 is very low no matter what. My blood pressure tends to be quite low as well but back in the days when I was a normal weight (my twenties and early thirties when I was just beginning to pack on the pounds, my blood pressure was always quite low. I guess I’m just returning to that normal, for me, rate. My temperature has always run low as well, about 97. I notice it’s back to that too. So (thank God) instead of coming out of the hospital with a new thing wrong with me, I came out realizing my health is better than ever and my heart is measurably healthier and stronger than it was last spring when I was just beginning to lose this weight. Back then my resting pulse was about 80 or 90.

The whole thing was quite a scare, though, and put me face to face with my own mortality. When I was sitting in my little cubicle with this terrible pain in my chest, I realized that this day could be “it” for me. Suddenly death became an absolute reality. I think until then it was always a sort of… someday, way off in the future (Death? Me? Nah!) thing. It just didn’t seem like a reality. Maybe subconsciously I believed Jesus would probably return before I died or that the world would explode in nuclear demise or something. Thursday I realized that death could be staring me in the face or this could, at least, be the beginning

of the end for me. Even Friday as I sat waiting for my tests. I no longer believed I was really going to get bad news, but I did acknowledge to myself that one of these days (hopefully in the distant future) I might very well be sitting in some hospital somewhere, somehow, just like this, and the test wasn’t going to come out so well, and it would be the beginning of the end. The end would really come someday, that is a fact that is incontrovertible. It sort of gave me a new perspective on the whole thing. It didn’t really change my life or anything but maybe gave me a new respect for the minutes I DO have right now.