Today I…
…celebrate?
…remember?
…passively observe?
…all of the above…
…the ten-year anniversary of my heart attack and cardiac arrest.
A brief recap: In the early morning hours of May 19, 2014, I had a heart attack while I was sleeping, but I didn’t know what was going on. My wife Elizabeth knew something wasn’t right and insisted on calling 9-1-1, even though it was 4:00 AM and nothing feels right at 4:00 AM and I would have been perfectly happy to go back to sleep and see how I felt at my normal weekday wake-up time of 11:22 AM.
I subsequently went into cardiac arrest at the ER.
She saved my life.
In those days, I was VERY active on Facebook and on the night after my event, I was wide awake in my hospital room at 2:30 AM, awaiting my next surgery and I wrote the update below to let all my Facebook friends and colleagues know what was happening. At the time I wrote this, we were about 22 hours into it, and still figuring a lot of stuff out.
So, to celebrate a decade of not being dead, here is my Facebook update from May 20, 2014.
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May 20, 2014
On Sunday afternoon I was finishing a weekend of long runs and bicycle rides in preparation for the Ironman Mont-Tremblant triathlon in August.
On Monday afternoon, I was lying in a hospital bed recovering from a heart attack - or something - but whatever it was, I now have a couple of stents in my heart and lots of wires and tubes running through me. Tomorrow, I will have a defibrillator inserted in my chest for the rest of my life. (Note to TSA: if you try to wand me at the airport gate, my defibrillator will short circuit and my heart will explode, so step off.)
It has given me a front-row seat to the three-ring circus we call a healthcare system.
In no particular order, I mocked medical studies that say:
1.) Distance training is dangerous
2.) Eating red meat is dangerous
3.) Eating fried food is dangerous
4.) Eating bacon is the most dangerous thing ever
In fact, one of the many reasons I trained and raced in triathlons was so that I could eat pretty much anything I wanted and not become fatty-fatty-boom-ballaty.
Guess I got that wrong.
So here I lie, at 2:37 AM, at the mercy of the U.S. healthcare system, wondering how it's all going to turn out for me and for all of us, really.
Here's what gives me hope:
- The genuine concern and professionalism of the people who are treating me (and there are a crap-load of them). It is entirely possible that the EMTs and the ER staff at the first hospital I went to saved my life when they zapped my ticker back from the brink of oblivion. I would like to offer a first-hand account of what happened, but my brain had apparently gone off to another, happier place where there are no electrically charged paddles sending 2000 bazillavolts through my nipples.
- All the technology in the hospital. It used to take a nurse five minutes with a glass thermometer filled with toxic mercury shoved down my gullet or up my ass just to take my temp. Now they have what could be an Xbox that tells my blood pressure, heart rate, pulse OX and temperature in about 20 seconds and no probe is going near my rectum. Two thumbs up!
But, with all these nice, bright, educated and truly caring people with their neet-o roto lasers and flux capacitive blood spinners, there's another side that makes it appear that the medical community has abandoned all pretense of simple common sense:
On my ambulance ride to hospital #1, they covered my chest with those stick-on pads to connect to the EKG leads. When I arrive at the ER, they admit me and have to remove the sticky pads from the ambulance because they are not compatible with the machine at the ER. After my heart does what was apparently a pretty good imitation of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon, the first hospital decides I need to be transported by ambulance to hospital #2's cardiac unit. Ambulance #2 has an EKG that is incompatible with the ER at hospital #1, so it's time to remove and replace another set of sticky pads on my chest.
I should pause here to give you a sense of what is actually happening: On a “hairy chest scale” of 1-10, where Brad Pitt and Beyoncé are a ‘1’ and a female silverback mountain gorilla is a ‘10’, I'm probably a ‘6’. So, there is some hair there.
Or there WAS hair there. Think the waxing scene in "40 Year Old Virgin" and you get the idea. If we did this to suspected terrorists in black-ops prisons, there would be congressional hearings and war crime tribunals.
Anyway, this follicular torture happened four more times before I am finally admitted to a room.
And what a room. It's actually perfectly nice, on the cardiac floor. Let me repeat: This is a floor full of people whose hearts took premature vacations. In addition to monitoring every beat, platelet, corpuscle and fart, we are supposed to be resting. Really, really resting. Like sleeping and stuff.
Well, tell that to the three-year-old running up and down the hall crying at 9:00 at night.
Or my roommate, Snory McSnororson, whose snores sound like his throat has been slit by "The Hound" in this week's episode of "Game of Thrones."
Or the night nurses admitting someone hard of hearing at 1:30 am in the next room.
Or the maintenance guy who can only fix that bed at 2:30 am. Hammer required.
Or the nurse who has to take my vitals every 13 seconds (or so it seems) and change my dressings at 4:30 am.
Yes, there are medical wonders in the modern healthcare system and then there are the things that just makes one wonder.
I say get me out of here. Whatever benefit accrues from 24-hour care is probably negated by the fact that I haven't slept in 36 hours. And I just had a heart attack, dammit!
I can't wait to get home where I can curl up with my bike and my wife and my dog in my own bed and dream about long swims, bike rides and runs that make me sleepy.
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And that’s the way it was, 10 years ago today.
It’s all good now, though I no longer do triathlons, which I miss. But I did take up the violin and, after nine years of lessons, I am about as good at violin as I was at triathlons (which is, to say, pretty mediocre.)
They did install a defibrillator in my chest, and in the five years after, I had two additional procedures to install more stents. Later this year, I will be receiving a brand-new defibrillator, as the batteries in this one are about at the end of the road.
I should point out, BTW, that since writing this, our healthcare and insurance systems have not improved (even though treatments have) and in fact, based on my observations, have deteriorated in the intervening 10 years (with Covid burnout being a major negative factor.)
It’s a bit hard to fathom that it’s been 10 years since all this happened, but then again, it’s a bit hard to fathom that I am not 27, eating burgers and fries 5x/week and shopping for a new bike every year.
I’m just happy to be here and hoping that the new defibrillator has a Bluetooth connection to the electronic shifting on the new bike I plan to guilt EK into letting me buy.