The Start Of A New, Different Life: 30 Days

Thirty days ago, I was sitting up in bed typing something quite different.

I was trying to decide if I should go to the hospital, and I was getting scared. I had reason to be.

Now, I’m sitting here a month later, trying to get onto this page words that express what the last thirty days have been like. What my mindset is. And it’s not flowing. Not yet.

The first thing that comes to mind is that there is still a great deal of fear, just a different kind. As I mentioned in my first post on this, I survived a heart attack that a small percentage are fortunate to wake up from. Serious enough that every doctor I’ve seen reminds me how lucky I am. But I feel the damage. Even now, it feels like there is something missing in my chest, like there is a hole where the front of my heart was. And that’s fairly accurate. I lost 40% of the function of my heart. I feel it when I get up in the morning, and when I’ve been on my feet awhile. When I bend down to pick something up, I have to be careful not to stand up too quickly or I get dizzy – my heart can’t do the blood pressure compensation it has to do for blood flow to be consistent to my brain.

A pacemaker. At 47 years old.

My meeting with the Congestive Heart Failure Team last week was both comforting and sobering. My medications are not at their full dosage because my heart is too weak to handle them. So, as my heart gains strength, they’ll up the dosage of one. That’ll drop my blood pressure again, and we’ll wait for the heart to gain a little more strength. And then we’ll raise the level of another.

I told the CHF team that I hated taking aspirin, and asked how long I would need to be on these medications.

“How long? The rest of your life.”

Oh.

Then came the next bit of reality. We’ll be monitoring the heart function over the next 2-3 months. If the heart was “stunned”, I should regain a fair amount of function. If, however, the damage was death of muscle, it won’t come back. At that point, it may be necessary to implant a device to help it out.

A pacemaker. At 47 years old.

It’s been quite humbling. I’ve always been a 90-mile-an-hour, run-around-with-hair-on-fire kind of guy. Alarm goes off in the morning and after the requisite 2 snoozes, I hit the floor running. Get breakfast made, get dressed, go go go.

Now, I have to move slower. And I’m learning how to do that. I have been going hard from the time I wake up for so long, that it’s automatic. And now my body rewards me by making me dizzy for 5-10 seconds. “Slow Down” it says.

I start to make breakfast and bend down to get a dish out of the dishwasher and when I stand up, I need to stop for a few seconds to breathe deeply and get the oxygen going again. The whole time, there is a mild ache in my chest. They told me it would be there, probably never go away. They had to cut off circulation to part of my heart to restore blood flow to the rest. Kind of killing my heart to save my life.

Save my life.

That’s a phrase that only recently has started sinking in. I had a heart attack and could just as easily never woken up. They saved my life.

And every time that thought enters my mind, it immediately goes next to my daughter. I could have left her without the one parent she’s counted on her entire life. She has lots of people who love her, but I’m the one she relies on. And that could have been gone.

What if I had died?

We actually started having the conversation today. She asked her Grammy last week about what would happen if I died. And the truth is, I hadn’t really thought about it until I was in the hospital. What if I had died? It’s not a question any parent wants to consider, but given the circumstances, it would be irresponsible for me not to put things in place.

What if I had died?

That’s not a question I had considered before. And yet, it’s all too real. And that’s where the fear now resides. Until a month ago, I felt strong. I was tired, but I had been working hard. But death? Not anywhere in my thoughts. Now, anytime I feel a little twinge in my chest, the thought looms large.

There’s the fear of being able to provide for my daughter. For the time being, I am on disability. I couldn’t work a full day. I have to take 1-2 naps a day to let my body recover. Between the cost of my meds and rent, 2/3 of my disability payments are spoken for. When you add in groceries, gas, and utilities, things get slim very quickly. And unless I can earn more than my disability payments, any money I earn is a deduction. Making it more concerning, it’s only good for a year. I hope I am well enough to work by then, but there’s no guarantee and if that runs out, I don’t know what comes next.

So, I’m living scared. Scared of things I have no real control over. I’m not a control freak, unless it comes to me. I need to be in control of myself, of my circumstances. But right now, I feel like a leaf in the wind.

The thing I keep reminding myself is that I’m still here. I still have time with my daughter. I made it this far. The CHF team has been very strong about letting me know that we will make things better. I just need to keep going forward. My friends are supportive, and I can’t thank them enough. But when my daughter is in bed, and the lights are out, it’s just me and a dull tired ache in my chest. And the fear.

I’ll get past this. I’ll get better, and I will be around to see my grandkids grow up. It’s going to be a long, slow path to follow. And a lot of fear to conquer.