It was a normal Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 and I was done with my nightly Internet surfing and I crawled into bed. It was midnight. I couldn't sleep. I had indigestion. I got up and took something for it. I still had it. Then my left arm started to ache and I just knew I was having a heart attack.
I woke up my wife, she woke up my son, who had been an EMT till a traffic accident broke his clavicle and he was forced to retire. He looked at me. He had my wife call 911. He gave me some nitro to whiff. He looked at me in an odd way. Later he would tell me that as an EMT he had learned the look of death on people; he said I had it, was radiating it.
The EMTs got there and after an EKG said I was not having a heart attack, but they would take me in anyway. At the hospital they said the same thing, no heart attack but they sent my EKG over to the head of the cardiac department and were waiting for instructions.
I was there about 20 minutes when something changed. All of a sudden my mostly empty room was crowded with people poking and prodding and sticking and taping. Finally someone said, "The head of the department saw your EKG, has woken up his team and they are all coming in; you are having a heart attack."
Dr. Tumati was a small man of Indian persuasion and had built the Catheter Lab at the hospital. As someone was shaving my groin he came in and spoke to us. He thinks I am having a heart attack. He thinks it is my LAD (Left Anterior Descending) artery. They call it the "widowmaker" as it does not show up on EKGs.
Before they took me in my son told me, "You are in good hands Dad. That is the kind of guy I want in my heart as well, if the time ever comes."
The Cath lab is a modern miracle. They pumped me full of morphine (my favorite), and wheeled me into the lab. It was cold, I remember that, but with morphine in your system you don't really care. they opened up my artery in my right leg at the crotch and pushed the catheter up from there to my heart. Being awake for this is a very strange experience.
I lost track of time as I lay there waiting to die. They were really pounding on the catheter. I didn't know that my LAD was 100% blocked; had no clue. They pounded at the blockage in my artery over and over. I didn't know what was happening. Then I felt my heart jump, I mean really jump in my body and I knew for certain that I had just died.
Everything I ever regretted about my life swept over me. I was fairly ballsy and brave at work, but in my private life, I had always settled. I loved my wife, but I knew she was not enough, that we were not enough for each other. I craved passion and settled for comfort and security and now I had blown it completely., Life is not a rehearsal and I had treated like it was and now it was over.
I held my breath and waited to see what happened next. It took me maybe three seconds to realize I was not, in fact, dead. Quite the opposite; it was the renewed flow of blood through the artery that caused the organ to "jump." And in that instant, I knew I was leaving my wife. I also knew the only scary thing about death, was meeting it before you were ready.
I continued to lay there as they slowly placed four stents inside my artery, pushing them one at a time up from my groin and into my heart. Four months later in Cardiac Rehab they would notice something while monitoring me on a treadmill and Dr. Tumati would once again take me into the Cath Lab. Some of the original stents he had used were not coated with an anticlotting drug, and they had started to block the artery again, so he cleared it out and placed coated stents inside of the non-coated stents.
Perhaps the strangest part of this procedure was that unlike the first time, for some reason I could feel the catheter as it entered and moved through my heart. I was not an unpleasant feeling, just something you are not supposed to feel in your heart. I guess what surprised me the most is how unafraid I was as I lay there. It could have just been the morphine, but I do know better than that.
Years later when I sat with Ayahuasca for the first time, I could have my intentions on something other than death.
No comments:
Post a Comment