The irony of the heart attack

    Alright, I don't want to hear anything about the smoking that will be mentioned in this. I quit the day I had the attack so we're good now.

I was sitting on my couch during the late afternoon while waiting for a phone call. As I was sitting there, my chest tightened. It didn't feel crushed, just tight like it would feel after a hard run or pretty much like it feels with a bad chest cold. I wasn't able to get a deep breath and as we all know, as soon as you realize you can't deep breath, you have to do nothing more urgently than deep breathing. I focused on my breathing and raised my arms over my head which normally helps in relaxing my breathing. The longer this went on, the more panicked I became. I took some essential oils to try and calm down, I laid down on my bed and stretched out, I was doing everything I could to calm down. The anxiety attack (because that's what I thought it was) was not really getting worse, but it also wasn't getting any better. I eventually began to feel clammy and flushed like a fever had just hit me. I got lightheaded and knelt down in my living room to get my bearings. It felt a bit like if you stand up too fast and get that headrush. By this time, it had been going on for around half an hour. I finally realized that I was in serious trouble. To be fair, I was still convinced it was a bad anxiety attack, and it was very hard to concentrate. I began to have difficulty walking straight. I went down the hall to my niece's room to ask her to take me to the hospital. Fortunately, she was off work that day. I got to her room and while her door was open, her back was to me, so I knocked on the door. She spun around, looked at me for a few seconds and told me I looked like death warmed over. I asked her to drive me to an ER at the hospital down the road from our house.

    She got ready to go, she kept trying to help me, but I am much larger than she is. I made it out to her car with difficulty. I had to keep going to my knees for rest. I finally got into the car, and we left for the hospital. I gave her directions to the ER entrance, but it is admittedly difficult to get to and honestly, I'm not sure how coherent I was. We eventually got to the hospital, but she couldn't find the parking for the ER, so I just had her park in regular parking. I asked her to go find someone to transport me to the ER and off she ran. I do have to give her credit because she was having a very relaxing day and now her uncle was possibly dying. I made my way across the parking lot and kept collapsing. I got to the side of the building and again collapsed. Had it not been terrifying and numbing, it would have been a great slapstick comedy. Once I reached the building, there were people coming and going in scrubs, but no one wanted to help me it seemed. They looked at me and just kept on walking. At one point I had collapsed into the shrubs by the side of the building next to the sidewalk. I kept standing and moving toward the building to get out of the parking lot, but I kept collapsing. Finally, I made it to the sidewalk and fully lay on the concrete and just tried to breathe.

    There was one young lady that was fairly new to whatever her job was due to the absolute horror in her eyes. After a great deal of time, my Neice showed up with a transport crew. Right after them was yet another transport crew. I had no idea who had called them. We got me upright and into the transport chair somehow. As a group, off we went to the ER. We got there and then the transporters simply left. My niece was briefed on how to deal with the transport chair and then left to her own devices. Fortunately, I was shortly taken back into a trauma room. Now if you have ever been in an emergency health situation, you will know that protocol rules all. When in doubt, follow protocol. In my case, that meant answering to same questions every time someone new walked into the room. I don't know how long this went on or how coherent I was but at some point, my niece started answering these questions for me. They finally got an EKG monitor on me and then all promptly freaked out.

    I have to tell you the story about the EKG. It was one of the twelve lead models and the tech that was trying to place it was a bit nervous I assume. In trying to get this thing situated on my torso, he was rushing and apparently doing something wrong. Now to lay the situation out, this tech was on my left side, there was another tech on my right side and then there were about fifteen other people in the room, no idea what they were doing at this particular time. I assumed I was close to death as I started to black out more and more frequently. I was no longer scared but very calm and I was beginning to get very sleepy. But at this same time, I was watching the tech to my left try and get this EKG set onto my torso and untangled. The tech on my right reached across and began to help him and at this point, they both got tangled in the wires and were freaking out. They were young and I doubt had been on the job for that long. I was trying to reassure them, but I was actively dying and I'm not sure how calming I was. During this time, they finally got the leads set up and it was working well. That is where the entire room freaked the hell out. Huge eyes all around. It had been roughly forty-five minutes I had been having a heart attack at this point. I was very concerned for my niece. She was in the room with me through all of this and she was stoic the entire time. I knew that she was secretly freaking out and I didn't want her to watch me die.

Shortly after the EKG incident, there were EMT's in the room. I was very confused. One other funny thing that happened during this trauma room situation. At some point they decided that they should place AED pads on my chest in case they needed to shock me. They shaved my chest and slapped them on, A different doctor entered and told them to remove them until they had the EKG leads in place. So, they pulled them off. Which hurt quite a bit. Yet another (I think) doctor entered and told them to put the AED pads on me, so they were slapped on again. Shortly before the EMT's arrived they decided that I didn't need them, so they pulled them off again. Once the EMT's arrived, the first thing they did was to slap more pads on my chest just in case. They transferred me to a gurney and off we went. They told my niece where I was headed, and I was drifting in and out.

    We go to the new hospital and immediately got me into a Cath Lab. The ironic thing here is that I used to work as a Medical Installation Specialist and mainly installed Cath Labs, MRI's and CT's. Many of them at this particular hospital. They wheeled me into the Lab and handed me over to the staff there. They all transferred me to the Cath table and the Cath staff went to work. Very shortly, what turned out to me my first Cardiologist had threaded into my heart and placed three stents in the main cardiac artery. One thing that no one told me, which I don't blame them for due to the emergent situation, was that I would have a massive post procedure reaction to the adrenaline rush I had been on. I basically began to shake violently. Nothing like a seizure, just major vibrations through my entire body. There were three major problems with this from my perspective. One: I was pretty much lying on a very narrow table that was fairly slippery and covered only by a couple of blankets giving me the fear of falling off. I wasn't aware that they had blocks in place to keep me on the table. Two: My body had been through around an hour of a heart attack causing me to have an adrenaline rush pretty much the entire time and I was pretty much completely exhausted when this reaction happened and Three: There was still a catheter in my heart as he worked diligently to find a way to place a stent in my left anterior descending artery. He had gone into the arteries through my groin which was jumping all over the table in opposition to my legs which were in full flap opposite to the core and I was trying very hard to keep still because it made sense to me. I was in no danger from this, but they didn't tell me until later.

    One final thing before I complete this post. During the procedure, the doctor was consulting with another doctor about next steps, and I learned while exhausted on the table that another term for the LAD was the Widow-Maker since it is a relatively short artery that runs from one ventricle to the other and any rupture can cause you to bleed out in seconds. That part I learned later.