‘Twas the night before Christmas
When all through the house
Not a creature was stirring
Except for my computer mouse.
For a hot second, I was tempted to rewrite the entire poem, but then I came to my senses. It’s the end of a really rough year in so many ways. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, though I think we can rightfully call it endemic now (my brain doc agreed with me). I was in the hospital for two weeks with life-threatening issues and I was so fucking lucky to escape mostly unscathed.
I’ve been doing a lot of research into Sudden Cardiac Arrests (SCAs) in the past week or two. My heart doc told me the last time I talked to him that his patients and their families become experts in SCAs in ways that even the medical experts aren’t. He’s right. And since it’s in my nature to research stuff, that’s what I’ve been doing. I signed up for the SCAF (Foundation) website and I’ll keep searching for a support group.
My problem is that I’m in a very small group. Only 10% of people who suffer an out-of-the-hospital SCAs actually survive. The number doubles for in-the-hospital SCAs. Even though mine were technically the former, it functions more like the latter since the EMTs got to me within minutes. At least the cops did.
Of that 10% who survive, most of them are expected to have some brain damage/other damage. I was without oxygen for some amount of time, though we are not sure exactly how long. At first, they thought it was thirty minutes, but it turned out to be more like ten minutes. Still not great, obviously, but better than thirty minutes. Still. The brain should not go without oxygen for more than three minutes. Mine went for over three times that amount.
I don’t have much problem accepting that all this happened to me or that I went through something medically traumatic. What I do have a hard time accepting is that I escaped it seemingly without any lasting physical damage. Survivor’s guilt is real and I’m struggling with it. Why the hell was I spared from the grim realities of what happened to me? I’ve read other stories of miraculous SCA survivals and even in those, there is still SOME damage. Or it took much longer to recover. I was walking normally within three days of waking up. I had a few issues with my vision and a huge issue with my stamina. I had a mild tremor in my middle left finger. That was the extent of it, though, and it all went away within the first month of returning home–except the stamina. I had a walker, but I never needed it to walk. I had someone help me wash my hair for two months, but that was simply a stamina issue. I could have done it myself if not for the part where I got tired so easily. I didn’t need the commode my brother put together and I was able to make it to the bathroom from the start. I didn’t have any accidents and stopped wearing my pull-up briefs after a month or so.
So I just read that if your brain goes without oxygen for more than 15 minutes, recovery is virtually impossible. I went without oxygen to my brain for roughly ten minutes, more or less, during my medical trauma. Probably less given that being deprived for ten minutes of oxygen to the brain is nearly unrecoverable from. That was a very inelegant sentence, but you get what I mean. From my brother’s Caring Bridge journal, he wrote:
They stated she had a pulse, but was not breathing. They bagged her to give her oxygen until the EMS arrived. When the EMS came she had a cardiac arrest, they administered the epi and shocked her. At that time, her blood oxygen level was 55-60%.
On the way to the hospital, she had another cardiac arrest and was shocked again. Once she arrived, they had difficulty getting her stable and at one point her blood oxygen level was 10% as I mentioned on the first report.
They in the first paragraph is the cops, by the way. As you can probably imagine, I didn’t know anything about blood ox levels before going into the hospital. I couldn’t tell you what was low, I mean. Reading the above paragraphs without prior knowledge, I would have thought that yeah, it’s not great to have 50-60% blood ox level, but I wouldn’t have thought it was deadly. Now, I know that anything under 95% is concerning.
By the way, the blood ox tube was my favorite thing by far in the hospital except for the ice water–which was fucking amazing. I sneered at oxygen bars before going into the hospital, but now I get it. The constant dose of oxygen made me feel extra alert and alive–although that might be the powerful drugs coursing through my vein as well.
Back to the oxygen deprivation. Now, in retrospect, it seems silly that they thought I was without oxygen for thirty minutes because that’s a lifetime. Even ten minutes is a stretch–it was more likely five or six minutes. I want to find the cops and EMTs who saved my life. The former should be fairly easy as I live in a smallish city whereas I’m not sure about the latter. Is that covered by the city I live in or by the city my city is a suburb of? I’m not sure. I’m going to do what I can to find them in the new year so I can thank them along with the Heart Center and ICU unit that took care of me in the hospital. They’re called the South 7 and have won national awards for their excellent heart care. Not just in the medical stuff, but also in the treating their patients compassionately and as whole human beings. I can attest to that from my stay, even though I mostly remember my time on the Progressive Care Unit (PCU), which was one floor… I want to say beneath the ICU. The funny part was that I stayed in the same room on both floors.
Spending time in a hospital is no fun. At all. There are people poking you at all times to take your vitals and the goddamn monitor machine (the one all the diagnostics were hooked up to) would beep at random because…profit? No, because something would breathe on it in the wrong way or something. The room was too hot, but some angel brought me a small electrical fan that I called Fanny and kept on the table by my bed. She was my BFF until the nurses brought in ice packs and then Fanny was dead to me. Ice packs on my body as I slept was the best thing ever and I shunned Fanny like that was my day job.
My god I was so doped up the entire time I was there. That’s understandable. I was on narcotics, antibiotics, and sedatives when I woke up. I don’t do drugs at all in my real life–I don’t even drink. So you can imagine how I reacted to being doped to the gills. I had so many delusions that felt so real. The funniest thing, though, was that I could talk like normal during that whole time so the people around me didn’t always immediately realize that I did not know what the fuck I was talking about.
My favorite story is about my discharge. They were hurrying to get me out of there because they needed beds for the pandemic. A nurse came in and ran me through everything I needed to know about my discharge. I nodded and repeated everything she said to me, remaining solemn. She gave me a bag and said she had put the instructions and discharge papers in the bag. I nodded again and she left. My brother and mother came, and I handed the bag to my mother. I said everything she needed to know was in there. She opened up to the bag to find–nothing. She asked where the papers were. I shrugged and said I didn’t know. I was just going by what the nurse told me and that’s all my brain could handle at the moment.
Later, when I thought about it, it was hilarious to me that the nurse told me, the drugged up patient, all that and hadn’t wait until my mother and brother arrived to tell it to them. I mean, I know there’s a bed shortage, but she couldn’t wait ten more minutes? Also, the memory of me nodding and repeating very seriously what the nurse told to me makes me laugh because I immediately forgot what she said a few seconds after repeating it to her.
I’m grateful that I’m still alive and apparently in fine fettle. I’m even more grateful that my sense of humor survived as well.