The end (of the year) is nigh and I could not be happier. This was a shit year in so many ways and I cannot wait to see the back end of it. I am really hoping that 2022 kicks 2021’s ass up, down, and all around.
I know I’m going to sound like a broken record, but let me recap the biggest event of the year for me–possibly my whole life. That may be recency bias, but it’s also an experience that literally changed my life. And it didn’t change my life at the same time. I’m sitting on my couch, looking out the window at a barren land. We’re suppose to get 2-4 inches of snow today. I’m sipping pumpkin-flavored coffee as my cat, Shadow, is snuggled down on my legs. I’m eating Limon Lays, which are faaaaantastic. I also have strawberry-pineapple flavored Mio water, which is fantastic. I’m rewatching the gingerbread house episode of Without A Recipe by the Try Guys, easily my favorite video from them in a long time, and I’m just feeling grateful to be alive. This could have happened on any day in the last year or two, minus the feeling grateful to be alive part.
To recap. Late September 2nd/early September 3rd, I was having a hard time breathing. I called 9-1-1, walked to my front door to unlock it (probably at the behest of the operator) and promptly fainted. Down I went and I remember none of this. The cops came and oxygen bagged me until the EMTs came. I had a cardiac arrest. The EMTs shocked my heart back to life. I had another cardiac arrest. They shocked my heart again. They also jabbed me with an Epi pen one of these times. Oh and I had an ischemic stroke at some point as well. The stroke is always an afterthought for whatever reason. It shouldn’t be because it’s still serious, but it’s not as deadly as a cardiac arrest. Mortality rate for an ischemic stroke after a month is roughly 28%. That’s in comparison to a sudden cardiac arrest mortality rate of 90%. I don’t think it’s cumulative, though, because if that were the case, I’d be dead twice over. Then again, I did die twice. I just happened to be resurrected twice as well.
I remained unconscious throughout this, I think? At any rate, I arrived unconscious. I can’t stop thinking of all the things that had to line up exactly right for me to survive, even to this point. My brother told me had I waited even a minute, I probably would not have been able to make the call. I’m lucky in that the cops of my city don’t really have that much to do and were able to get to me so quickly. And that they knew to bag me. I’m lucky that the EMTs were so damn good at their jobs. And I’m lucky that my heart responded to the defibs and the Epi pen.
More luck: I was taken to Regions Hospital, which has one of the best heart centers in the state. Award winning, in fact. Hell, not just the state, but the country, maybe. My brother has a friend who had a heart attack/cardiac arrest a month or so before my own medical experience. He was taken to Regions, but they didn’t have a bed, so he was taken somewhere else. He died at the other hospital.
They had a bed when I was rushed there. That was damn lucky. I had the best heart team in the state taking care of me. In the first week, I was still unconscious. They lowered my temp to cushion my brain and heart. This is a relatively new way of treating a cardiac arrest and it’s known to have good results. Not all hospitals do it, however, so I was lucky that Regions Hospital is one of the hospitals that does. Oh, and the biggest factor in an increased chance of surviving a cardiac arrest is having bystanders around who know how to do CPR.
The first time my medical team tried to raise my temp back to normal so they could see if I could breathe on my own did not go well. I fought the ventilator and they had to put me back on ice. They also wanted to put me in the MRI machine to scan my brain activity, but they had to wait on that as well. The next day, they were able to do all of that successfully. That was another incident of luck, that I was able to tolerate the breathing machine and that they were able to take the MRI.
The biggest piece of luck, though, came next. I had been unconscious for roughly a week and the doctors wanted to talk to my brother about the fact that I could not breathe on my own. In other words, they wanted to talk about possibly pulling the plug on me. Which, I hate that my brother had to be in that position.
Side note: I was unconscious through all this so I don’t remember any of it, obviously. I like to joke that I had the easy part because I got to just lie there while everyone else did all the work. It’s mostly a joke, but my brother did a hell of a lot of work that first week. The second week and further, too, but I’m mainly thinking of that first week. I’m single, which means I have no partner to make these decisions for me. My parents are too far away to be able to do that and they are not at their best in the times of crisis, anyway. So everything fell on my brother’s shoulders. He was the one who met with my medical team to discuss what was happening to me. He was the one who set up the Caring Bridge journal in order to keep everyone updated. He was the one who kept in touch with my parents and Zoomed them in to see me while I was unconscious. He was also the one who had to make decisions about what to do medically if the docs needed permission.
I know he was thinking about planning my funeral because he told me about it. I know that my two besties were trying to decide if they should fly in to see me in the hospital and say their goodbyes or if they should wait until I died so they could fly out for the funeral. I was supposed to die. No one thought I was going to live.
My brother was thinking about pulling the plug as he walked to his car to drive to visit me roughly a week after I collapsed. As he was walking to his car, the hospital called him to tell him I had woken up. That was the luckiest moment of all. Do I know why I woke up? No. Do the docs? Also no. But I did.
Now, as I’ve mentioned before, the doctors warned my brother that IF I woke up (big if), I would probably have brain damage and bodily damage as well. I probably would have trouble walking, talking, and doing other basic tasks. The more I research both sudden cardiac arrests and ischemic strokes, the more I realize how grave (pun intended) my odds were of surviving at all, let alone returning as anything approaching normal.
It’s almost four months after the initial night where I laid passed out on my front hallway floor. I have passed all my tests with flying colors and both my heart doc and my brain doc have given me the thumbs up to live my life as I see fit (within reason, of course). I have changed irrevocably since that night and yet, I’ve become more of myself as well. I have not lost my sarcastic sense of humor, but I have gained a deep sense of gratitude that I hadn’t had before. I appreciate my friends and brother more than ever, but I have realized just how deeply the family dysfunction runs.
Everything is the same; everything is different. These are both true. One of my goals in the new year is to learn to live with this duality.