heart attack/disease

Overheard at The Royal Alex


While I was kept waiting to see Rob (the wing had shut for quiet hours just before he was brought to the Cardiac ward (unit 24 room 14 – in case you should ever need the information yourself – god forbid), I witnessed a couple of medical dramas not my own by the elevator.

The first was a heated exchange between a tall dark-haired man in his late forties or early fifties, flanked by two equally gangly mop-headed late teens who looked at their boat sized feet most of the time and hid behind hair that obscured the top halves of their faces, and a nearly as tall woman who, judging from the badge, was some sort of social worker.

She was imploring the man to return and complete a test that “absolutely saves lives”, and it was then that I noticed the tell-tale wristband, marking him as an escapee.

He had a duffel that he gripped like an ax handle and sent both boys and woman into hasty retreat when in his agitation he began gesticulating with it.

“I’m hungry, ” he told her. “Don’t you understand. I haven’t eaten for a day and a half and they are telling me that a test I should have had 3 and a 1/2 hours ago is still another 3 to 4 hour wait.”

“Emergencies come up,” the woman countered. “I’m sure you understand.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. This is ridiculous. There’s no reason why I should have to wait without eating for two days for a test that just a screening.”

“It’s a life-saving screening,” she corrected him.

“I’m done,” he said, hitting the elevator call button.

“What if you develop cancer, ” she pulls out the big gun. Cancer is a huge gun. I’ve had it pulled on me as I am adamant about the useless nature of mammograms before menopause for the majority of women. Health care professionals like to use fear even in the face of statistics.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he strains this through his teeth and turns to the opening elevator and barely restrains himself from clocking the broad as she hits the button causing the doors to close his face.

“You don’t know that,” she says with the smugness of someone who knows she will win an argument based on the fact that her point can’t be proven false unless her opponent submits to her will.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” he motions to the boys who shrug at the woman, whose dumbfounded look says she can’t believe that her normal browbeating tactics have failed.

He stalks to the stairs with boys slouching behind him and she follows like an avenging angel.

It’s only later, when the man and the boys re-materialize and I catch a bit more of the dialogue between them that I realize he was here to have the routine colonoscopy that’s forced on everyone when they hit fifty regardless of personal statistics.

I don’t know if the guy escaped for good, but he did look less cranky, so perhaps he’d eaten at any rate.

Not long after, another 50 something gentleman in a leather jacket emerged from Unit 24, fingers clamped to his wrist and looking a bit harried. I could make out blood and remembering Rob’s angio clamp on his wrist, I quickly guessed that this guy’d had one too but was being released stentless.

He hovered about the elevator. Agitated and peeking beneath his reddening fingers and looking about as though expecting to see hospital personnel coming to his rescue.

Mostly who you see in the unit halls of the Royal Alex are housekeeping staff though I am not sure what they clean. Rob reported that in the 18 or so hours he spent in room 14, he never saw housekeeping do more than empty the trash baskets.

“Can you bring me a clean pair of socks when you pick me up on Saturday, ” he told me on the phone Friday night. “The washroom floor is sticky with urine and my socks are gross.”

Later he told me that the nurses dumped the bedpans in the room’s only toilet.

“I think they toss the contents at the toilet from the doorway.”

Leather Jacket was definitely in a panic by the time the hapless cardiac resident emerged from the elevator. I would see this same doctor later in Rob’s room. He shuffled through a stack of files and practically ran over Leather Jacket, who clearly recognized him and thrust his self-clamped oozing wrist in the junior cardiologist’s face.

Junior’s expression? Aw, fuck.

“It won’t stop bleeding,” Leather Jacket. “What do I do?”

At the Royal Alex, they try to go into the heart through the main artery accessed at the wrist instead of going through at the groin. Part of the reason is that the incision at the wrist closes faster, requiring a 2 to 4 hour period of tight clamping and immobilization as opposes to the 4 to 6 hours of lying flat on the back with the groin. Turnover clearly being the goal.

Leather Jacket was turned-over a bit prematurely.

Junior Heartman tried to fob the guy off, but he was persistent in his fright, so the doc sat him down and patiently explained that Leather Jacket needed to keep the pressure on for a few more hours and all would be well.

And if not, he should stop by the ER.

At this Leather Jacket began peppering Junior with questions while Junior nodded and made polite vocalizations. He was busy flipping through charts and really was just waiting for Leather Jacket to calm down, catch a clue and then an elevator.

When I told the story to Rob on Monday, he remembered Leather Jacket too. He’d burst into room 14 in search of a nurse before I’d even seen him.

The nurse admonished him.

“I can’t be checking you. You’ve been discharged. Go to the emergency room.”

But after a bit of whining, she tightened his clamp a bit and sent him down the hall – where I would see him.

The incision at the wrist is not stitched closed but merely tightly clamped. I am not certain how people on blood thinners manage to clot the hole in a major artery closed, but they do – provided the clamp doesn’t come loose too soon.

I haven’t heard any tales of dead men in leather jackets being found in the Royal Alex parkade, so I will assume that all’s well that ended well for him, or that he spent 7 or 8 hours in the ER.

After Your Husband Has a Heart Attack


The aftershocks come in waves and they are not proportional to the severity of the event.

Rob’s heart attack barely rocked the cardiologist’s Richter scale, but it lifted us up off our foundations and set us down again hard. I am left feeling slightly askew and wondering about the direction of the path I thought was straight forward and relatively paved.

In the last six months, I’d prepared for a new career path that focused more on the real world rather than the innerscape my writer self shelters herself in. I’d become more or less content with writing for the Internet and questioned the purpose and practicality of finishing the memoir – or even going back to a fictionalized account of how I ended up in such a different life from the one I’d imagined a bit more than a decade ago.

“It’s funny how we end up where we are,” Rob mused as we sat sipping tea on the back deck after his first long stroll yesterday afternoon. “I didn’t ever really picture myself a heart attack survivor or even having one at all.”

I can’t say I haven’t pictured myself a youngish widow again. I am wired for “what if” and have buried everyone I know and love dozens of times as my mind grapples with far-flung scenarios they way other people plan their weeks. But I will admit that I have grown comfortably complacent enough to suppose that Rob and I will celebrate many a double-digit anniversary together.

“You really freaked out on me,” he pointed out later in the day.

I can’t tell if he is disappointed or surprised by this. As I told the older girls while I paced the waiting area during the hour of time we had no idea where he was or if he’d sustained any unplanned damage during his angiogram,

“Grace under pressure is not me, so I hope you weren’t looking for it.”

Indeed, it took me well over two months to adjust to my late husband’s death sentence and the dementia that came with it. Which is not to say that I lost my presence of mind or that I was unable to tend to the details, I function – sometimes at quite a shockingly high altitude, but I am sharper than recently honed blade and my Sagittarian bent for action is idling constantly when not actually propelling me.

“I didn’t know what was going on or where you were,” I said, again.

“Well, were you expecting them to hand me back to you in an urn?” he asked with a smile.

“Yes,” I said. “I had no idea what had happened and no one seemed interested in clueing me in. All I needed was a ‘we were able to fix him during the angiogram but he needs to stay overnight and he’s being admitted, go get something to eat and check with admittance for his room number in an hour.’ Honestly, I would have been a totally different person had someone been bright enough to do that.”

Waiting though did give me time to reassess, and sometimes this is not reactionary as much as it is necessary redirection.

One of the things that was painfully clear as I paced was that I was in no way prepared for a disaster.

Last summer when Rob went into the ER for an abscess, he prepared a file for me with all the pertinent information I would need “just in case” – and no, it’s nice to have him leap to morbid conclusions the same as I do. It makes me feel less of a dark, twisted freak.

But in the interim, the file vanished beneath piles of paper which in turn were scattered thither and yon as we moved our lives from one room to another to stay ahead of reno work.

I was also painfully aware of legalities that still haven’t been completed like Dee’s adoption, my being on the house title and some banking details that would give me access without having to wait on lawyers and courts.

And we’re still fairly non-committal on the whole “last wishes and remains disposal” thing despite numerous conversations.

And yes, this is what races about in my brain in a medical emergency. While all of you superior humans focus on the positive and can readily put hands on rose-coloured specs, I start compiling lists for my worst case scenario action item agenda.

I find myself checking Rob’s colouring and watching his breathing. I ask him constantly how he is feeling and match up my exterior check with his answer. I am always trying to get him to rest.

“You almost died,” I told him last night as I curled up on his lap while he waited for the data recovery program to finish snatching Edie’s life off her barely breathing hard drive.

“I did not,” he countered, a bit annoyed.

“Well,” I said, not ready to let it go, “it could have been much worse. You did ignore your symptoms all week.”

“There’s nothing like waking up with sharp chest pains,” he said.

“And if you hadn’t, you  would have gone to work,” I said, “and anything could have happened. What if we’d been at the family reunion? Miles from medical help.”

“But we weren’t,” he said, “and it was hard to know what was really wrong before.”

“I told you even before Thursday that your symptoms could be heart attack related,” I said.

“When?”

“Repeatedly, ” I insisted. ” And I was right.”

“It’s important for you to be right?”

“Yes.”

And it is. I have been down this road of scoffing, pooh-poohing husband with scary and persistent physical maladies.

“If I had experienced chest pains while we were camping,” I pointed out, “there is no way we wouldn’t have packed up and headed to the ER.”

He couldn’t refute me. Rob is hawkish about my health but very much like the typical man when it comes to his own.

I am uncertain about how I feel. The medical professions thus far appear blase with the discharging cardiologist telling Rob he can go back to work in a couple of weeks (a “couple” means “two” where I come from). He handed Rob a recipe of prescriptions – some of which make zero sense. They want him to take medication for lowering cholesterol even though his levels are fine and in spite of the very serious side effects of statins and the recent studies that show there is no link between high cholesterol (which Rob doesn’t have, or did I mention that) and heart disease. Apparently in the Alberta medical world, heart attack treatment is one size fits all.

And even Rob is agitating to work from home at least via his computer and the phone because he is in charge of some major projects with multi-million dollar scope and long-range implications for his career.

“When did I become a corp whore,” he asked bemusedly just the night before his heart attack.

But I find myself grappling with need to hurry up and finish things – the reno, writing projects and such. Time being suddenly of the essence again in a way it hasn’t for a few years. That’s probably aftershocks. I have a feeling they may continue in unexpectedly ways and waves for a while.