I didn’t sleep well last night. Or rather, I didn’t sleep long. I slept hard, but only six hours. Then I couldn’t sleep any longer. Normally, I wouldn’t be surprised by that because that’s how much I used to sleep before going to the hospital. Since I got out of the hospital, however, I’ve been sleeping eight hours a night. Very surprising! Well, not really, given the narcotics, sedatives, and antibiotics I was hopped up on. They were some very powerful drugs and they didn’t exit my system completely until I was home for two-and-a-half weeks.
Afterwards, I still was able to mostly sleep eight hours a night, only waking up once or two. In the last few days, however, my sleep has been spotty. I think it’s because I’m detoxing from the parental visit. I had a hard time falling asleep last nigh t and I woke up early.
I had three emails from my mother waiting for me when I got up, which did not improve my mood. My parents had to quarantine for fourteen days in a hotel upon returning to Taiwan–which means they have very little to do. Which means my mother can email me several times a day. Which is annoying, in case you can’t tell from my terse sentences.
Here’s the thing about abuse. It’s difficult to tell how deleterious it is while it’s still ongoing. It’s terrible, yes, but it becomes normal when it’s continuous. I mean, that’s just the way life works. Even the most unusual event, positive or negative, becomes normal when it continues to happen or enough time has passed from the time it happened. Take, for example, my recent medical trauma. It’s not every day you suffer from pneumonia, two cardiac arrests, and a stroke, and live to tell the tale.
Side Note: I was reading an advice column and a writer wrote in that her mother had suffered a stroke. It was tangential to the actual issue, but the advice columnist said that having to have someone care for you after a stoke is common. That hit me hard for some reason. I mean, it’s common sense and it’s not as if I didn’t know it before. But seeing it in print drove home the fact of how lucky I was to survive two cardiac arrests and a stroke with almost no damage. Seriously. I’ve gotten the clean bill of health from both my cardiologist and my neurologist–which is incredible.
I just read up on cardiac arrests and I’m shooketh. I knew the possibility of surviving a cardiac arrest is roughly 10% because my brother told me that once I woke up. But for whatever reason, I didn’t really take in that meant 90% of people die from it. I mean, I knew it on some level, but it didn’t really register. The key is CPR (from everything I’ve read) and I was incredibly lucky in that aspect as I had both my cardiac arrests in an ambulance with professionals at hand.
The stats on surviving a year after a cardiac arrest are inconclusive and predicated on sustaining lasting damage during the cardiac arrest itself. In other words, not me. My heart doc has said there’s nothing wrong with my heart. My brain doc said I was probably stronger than he was. All my labs have been good. The results of the heart monitor were good. There is no sign that there’s anything wrong with my heart.
My heart doc emphasized that it was the pneumonia that caused everything else–not anything structurally wrong with my heart or brain. I didn’t have any surgery except for the angiogram. This is all still wild to me. All that trauma and I had no surgery. One of the weirdest things for me now is that I \have no physical reminders of what happened to me other than the small scars from all the needles poking into me.
Pneumonia, two cardiac arrests, and an ischemic stroke. All within twenty minutes of each other.
I can reread that several times and still not grasp that it actually happened to me.
I’ve told this story before, but it has stuck with me. The nurse’s aide who helped washed my hair told me about a friend of hers who had gone through a similar situation as mine. He was in his late forties when he had three cardiac arrests and a stroke. He was a varsity hockey player in high school and kept up his fitness. He was in a coma for several months before he woke up. Now, ten years later, he is permanently disabled and cannot work. He lives with his brother and will never be able to live alone again. He has necropathy and needs electric stimulation to help ease that. His life changed that day and he has never been the same.
Everything I’ve read about cardiac arrests and strokes emphasize how changed a person will be even if they survive. Again, this is something I knew because my brother was very candid about what was supposed to have happened to me (and I read the Caring Bridge journal entries), but it’s sobering to read about it in the abstract.
The most common neurological damage after a cardiac arrest is hypoxic ischemic brain injury, which occurs when the brain is starved of oxygen and then the heart is restarted. Mine was. We’re not sure for how long I was no-oxygen, but it was probably more than a minute or two. I should have taken neuronal damage when the oxygen started flowing again, but I apparently didn’t.
Other brain damage includes affecting movement, speech, attention, concentration, and memory. I had a little bit of memory issues in the first month I was home from the hospital, but that has gone away now. As far as I can tell, I don’t have any lasting brain damage. I also haven’t had any impact in my movement, speech, or thinking abilities. It’s not just me saying this, either. My friends ad family have marveled aloud about how I seem just the same as before–and they’re not wrong. But they’re not completely right, either.
Yes, physically, I haven’t sustained any permanent damage (that I know of), but psychologically, I’m not as sure. I don’t question why this happened to me because why not? I’m not special or superhuman and I don’t take especially great care of myself. I can’t expect to be excepted from negative medical events happening to me. I mean, there are 350,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests a year, so why wouldn’t one (or two!) happen to me? 750,000 people have a stroke a year so again, why not me? Granted, most people don’t have three of these events within twenty minutes of each other, but again, it’s not completely unheard of. Obviously.
I have had psychological ramifications from the event, but I’m not sure if it’s the medical stuff or the family stuff–or both. In addition, I was anxious and depressed before it all happened–and I already suffered from PTSD. So, yes, it’s flared in the past few months, but I don’t think it’s because of the medical trauma itself. I honestly think it’s more because of the family dysfunction than the medical trauma. Especially since I’m physically recovered. I have maybe 5% more stamina to get back, but that’s it.
Why me? I have no idea. Yes, I usually say ‘luck, love, and Taiji’ saved me, but that can’t be the whole answer. I know I need to see a therapist to deal with what happened to me, but it’s not something I can deal with right now. And I also know I need it more to deal with the family abuse than the medical trauma. Survivor’s guilt, yes, but not the actual medical stuff.
I think that’s the funniest part of this whole thing–the series of events that caused the rift in my life turns out to be the least-important part of the last three months. And I can say that in part because I’m enormously lucky to be back to ‘normal’. If I had had to do extensive rehab, I wouldn’t be able to spend so much energy thinking about the family dysfunction.
Honestly, I think I would have preferred that, even knowing how lucky I am not to have to do it.