I was reading about the ramifications of a cardiac arrest and the ramifications of a stroke. I wrote a post about it, but didn’t really come to any conclusions other than I’m really lucky not to have to do months if not years of rehab (though I might have preferred that to dealing with the deep family dysfunction. This is easy for me to say, however, because I don’t have to do it).
This post is not about that, though. At least not directly. It’s more about knowing what is and isn’t a warning sign that something like that might happen again. Here’s the thing. Since my two cardiac arrests and stroke weren’t triggered because of the usual reasons (heart problems for the former and narrowed blood vessels for the latter. Well, the latter might have happened, but not for the usual reasons. I just learned there’s something called a transient ischemic stroke, which is probably what I had), how am I supposed to prevent it from happening again?
I just read the ways to prevent a stroke on the Mayo Clinic website and I already do most of them. The biggest one is losing weight and I have complicated feelings about that. I won’t get into that for this post, but suffice to say that I’m always suspicious of the insistence to lose weight as the be-all/end-all for any reason. But I’m already eating five fruits/veggies a day, not smoking (being unconscious for a week took care of that for me), exercising every day, not drinking, not having diabetes, and not doing drugs. The only other one I have to keep an eye on is having sleep apnea. I’ve never had a sleep study, but I’m pretty sure I have it.
As for cardiac arrest, my heart is in great condition. My heart doc has said it. My labs have said it. My heart monitor result has said it. My doc emphasized that the cardiac arrests were not because there was anything wrong with my heart–it was the pneumonia. Angiogram said there were no rips or blockages in my heart–which is great! I’m getting an EEG/EKG on Monday and then talking to my heart doc a week later. Again, this is just checking in and making sure everything is running ok. I’m not expecting anything to show up in the EEG that is untoward or harrowing because there has been nothing bad so far. I expect my heart doc to give me the green light again.
If that’s the case ,then I’m free of doctor appointments. I have nothing planned beyond these two appointments, which is really strange. Again, it’s only been three months since the initial event occurred. That’s a blink of an eye and no time at all. On the other hand, I’m amazed that it’s already been three months. Three months and I’m no longer thinking about it every day. In the first month after it happened, it was constantly on my mind. Then, it took a backseat to the family dysfunctions and I rarely thought about it at all. Now, with my parents gone, I am thinking about it again because it was a big thing that happened to me. It got shunted to the back of my mind, but that doesn’t mean I forgot about it.
I still don’t wonder why it happened to me in the first place. As I’ve said before, I’m not special in that I should be exempt from horrific medical events. That’s something that many people asked me about–whether I asked why it happened to me. Nope. I’m not in the best shape and I used to smoke two to three cigarettes a day. I am fat.
Side note: It’s fascinating that people get really freaked out when I call myself fat. They rush to reassure me that I’m not fat–which is a lie. I am objectively fat. I’m not putting myself down, but it shows how negative our society views fatness. Fatness is not bad. It’s not good. It just is.
So, yeah. I’m not surprised that all that shit happened to me–at least, not any more surprised than a serious medical event would elicit on its own. No one really expects to experience a heart attack (cardiac arrest!) or stroke. Not really. Because it’s not something that’s a daily occurrence or something that happens normally.
By the way, I am careful to say that I had two cardiac arrests and not two heart attacks because they are different and caused by different things. My heart stopped, but not because there was anything wrong with the heart itself. So, not a heart attack. As for the stroke, it was an ischemic stroke. It seems more like a transient ischemic stroke than a full one, but that’s just my layperson’s interpretation of events.
For the last month or so, I was just gritting my teeth and getting through. I wasn’t thinking about my health at all. Well, not my physical health. My mental health, on the other hand, took a deep hit for the last month. Last two-and-a-half months, actually, but even harder in the last month. By the end , I was just gritting my teeth and hoping that the end would come soon. I kept in mind something Ian’s basic training instructor had said to him during basic camp: You can do anything for six weeks as long as you do it one day at a time. I just had to do it twice, so I broke it down into two chunks.
Time is so weird. After the first six-and-a-half weeks, I was in a low place. My father’s delusions flared out of control and there was an epic argument that nearly destroyed me. It irrevocably changed my view on my mother for the worse. Let me be clear. I already knew she would choose my father over me and my brother, that she would willingly throw me under the bus to make him momentarily happy. I knew that her entire being was keyed to him and his turbulent emotions. I knew she was codependent with him and an enabler of his abuse.
What I didn’t realize was how deep it ran. The codependency, I mean. It wasn’t until this visit that it really hit me–she would save him from drowning over me. I’m not even talking about metaphorically. There was a moment when I thought to myself, “She would let me die if it meant a better life for my father.” And when we were arguing about me not treating my father with enough respect and love, she said something about being glad I had survived my medical scare. I interrupted her and asked if that was really true because she certainly wasn’t acting like it.
That’s what it came down to. I felt as if she didn’t care that I had survived because she was so focused on my father’s ever-changing feelings. So now, while I know I have to take better care of my physical health, I’m more worried about my mental health at the moment. I need to look for a therapist in order to deal with those issues, but I don’t have the energy to do that. Maybe in another month or two.