4 months skating…

Last April 15 I ended my post promising to “tell the tale in the mornng.”  It’s night and over 4 months later.  Sorry.

Four months ago Jude and I went into the Apple store here in Portland.  I was looking for a new case for my iPhone.  We came out of the store and about 20 feet from the door a large farm animal landed on my chest.  I sat down on a wood slat bench with a thud and reached for my nitro.  Judy didn’t know what was happening until I reached in my pocket.  But, according to her, I was turning several shades of gray.

I definitely thought this was “it.”  Three nitros I popped and still that damn horse was laying across my chest.  I had stopped moving and tried to breath slowly, hoping my heart would calm down.  But it didn’t.  I took one look at Judy and told her to call the ambulance.

I was very scared.

Finally she got someone at the Verizon booth to call 911.  Byt the time she got back to me all we could really do was look at each other, not saying anything, holding back tears.  Finally “I love you” passed between us, just in case.

I don’t think the words had made it from my lips to her ears before the paramedics arrived.  Equipment flew around, wires were snaked into my body, somebody popped an aspirin into my mouth and gave me a mighty dose of nitroglycerin.  I got dizzy.  People stopped and stared.  Large blue men and women scurried around me–quickly, but with purpose–shouting out numbers and looking at each other.

Finally I was wheeled out of the mall and put in the ambulance.

Those paramedics arrived at my side 1 minute and 45 seconds after that 911 call went in.  They were “in the area” and bragging about that time to each other just before the ambulance doors shut.  I was still scared, but after two more hits of nitro the palomino left and one of those cute little ponies took up residence.

At the hospital it was insane.  I really mean, insane.  There were suicidal and violent people, cops and doctors scurrying everywhere while family members stood against walls and in doorways with worried, far away looks in their eyes.

I stayed in the hospital for a couple days.  No heart attack.  My EF was down.  I had PVC’s and bigiminies and my status was definitely changing, but I was not dying.  Cool.

It feels like I haven’t blogged for so long.  In some ways, I didn’t want to write about a downturn in my status.  I also got some news that I didn’t want to make public, even to my family.

In getting educated about my the experimental open heart remodeling back at the start of 2007, I took a continuing ed course from Baylor University and actually watched the surgery online.  Partly as a result of that course, I began receiving a journal of cardiology meant certainly for physicians.

One article I received had the headline, “Heart Failure patients unrealistic about prognosis.”  It was about a study of people with my diagnosis and test results measuring the patients estimate of longevity versus the clinical prognosis from a standardized calculation.  They tested the calculation and found it within 3% of actual longevity.  They found that a diagnosis like mine was almost exactly the same as a diagnosis of cancer, but that doctors had not communicated this, or the real prognosis, to their patients–who made life choices and decisions based on a false and unrealistic expecation of life.

The standardized calculation method was available to me, but required many test results.  Fortunately I had all these numbers and results in my own online medical records.  So I plugged them in.  And got a number.

It wasn’t a large number.

For these last 4 months I have looked at my life in an even more different way than these last couple years.  As my son, Brian, tells me, “You don’t know, Dad.  People live long lives when docs say they won’t.”  I didn’t tell him the number, and yes–he is right.  But I have come to not really care about that.  It simply is not a worry anymore.

Though some of you who know me would say I don’t edit myself much as it is, I have to say that editing myself or my life seems like an awful waste of time!  I delight in life every day and I try to be prepared each moment for an enormous change.

Maybe I’ll write that number down, here, one day.  Maybe I’ll wait until the day after that “expiration date” and laugh, joining the likes of people who move to mountaintops to wait for the aliens or the religious wingnuts waiting for the rapture who have to–at some point–just get on with it!

I’ve definitely taken a turn back toward heart transplant.  I have that old cough back.  I get winded getting ice out of the freezer some days or just trying to get my iPhone out of my pocket.  Other times I’m okay as long as I’m not going uphill!  I can walk quite a ways, sometimes, and others I have to sit and rest.  It’s a return to what feels like not that long ago.

I’m going to try to get back in the swing of this.  It feels good to return to writing, though it feels a little bit like giving in to a turn back toward hospitals and nitroglycerin and worried looks…

So be it.

I hope this finds you well and that Fall hasn’t returned before you got to rest this Summer.

Art in the Pearl tomorrow.  Life is very good.

Now get back outside before the rain starts…