On October 24th at 10:43pm I called 911, because Patrick told me to. In the spirit of transparency and to eliminate the possibility of further embarrassing discussion surrounding the events of the evening, I will tell you we had been intimate about 10 minutes prior. At the time of the call we had settled into bed, gotten comfortable, and Samuel was asleep between us. Everything seemed fine. Everything seemed normal. Patrick had returned from a very short, fairly stressful trip to Arizona that morning, just after midnight. He had a full night of rest before we went to church, and we spent the rest of the day together as a family. Everything was as it should be. Until he reached over, took my hand, and said something was going on. I know by now that when he says that, it means he is feeling something going on inside his chest and that it is likely his heart. Often it amounts to nothing. A palpitation. An extra beat. A missed one. Sometimes I will put my fingers on his pulse in his wrist and we will sit in silence, waiting for our worst nightmare to come true. Most of the time I can’t feel the error going on inside his heart. With a pacemaker working full time, it's just enough of a correction that all seems well on the outside.
On the night of the 24th it took Patrick an alarmingly short amount of time to tell me to call 911. And for those of you who know him well, you likely know he won’t do that unless it's REALLY bad. So obviously I panicked. What happened next is a bit fuzzy, and the parts I do remember, I wish I didn’t. He began breathing hard, his body moving like he was in an immense amount of pain. I had the light on and Samuel remained asleep while I spoke with the dispatcher on the phone. I even put it on speakerphone because she was asking questions he could very easily answer himself. And he did. Rudely. Was he breathing? Of course he was. Was he in pain? F*** yes, he was. Was he clammy? All Patrick wanted to know was when the F-ing paramedics were going to get there, and he said that very loudly. She assured me they were on the way, and I think that was around the same time his eyes rolled into the back of his head, he arched his neck, stopped talking and breathing, and I thought he was dying. I thought I was losing him. I thought the love of my life was dying before my eyes and I was powerless to stop it. I began to cry. I ignored whatever it was she was saying, because I didn’t want to spend the last moments I had with him trying to sort through the nonsense she was saying. I stroked his face. I called out to him. I could barely see him through the tears. I think I told him not to leave me. That I wasn’t ready. I later found out he could hear me crying and talking to him, but he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t see me. He was awake and mostly aware of what was going on around him, but he couldn’t move his body or react in any way. Then he blinked, and his neck relaxed, and he looked up at me groggily. I could feel the adrenaline rushing through me. It’s understandable that I couldn’t comprehend the passage of time. What we thought was a minute or two, was actually four minutes and twenty-seven seconds of ventricular tachycardia that should have killed him. It’s a miracle that it didn’t. He recovered quickly, after I was certain he was awake and I was sent on a mad search for uncoated aspirin. I was a mess. I brought back the coated baby aspirin because it’s all I could find, only to realize he didn’t have his dentures in and couldn’t chew them. I have since bought a bottle of the correct aspirin to keep upstairs, and Patrick has showed me where the correct one was downstairs. During the search for aspirin, our ten-year-old came out of her bedroom. I’m pretty sure she saw me mostly naked, that poor girl. Clothing is the last thing on your mind when you are trying to save the life of your spouse. Shortly after she came out we dressed, and I told her to go back to bed. That Daddy was fine and the paramedics were coming to check on him. But she had seen enough. She knew something was wrong. We haven’t hid Patrick’s condition from the kids. Quite the opposite, in fact. They know the perilous hold on life his heart has, and how his outward appearance doesn’t match the poor quality of his heart’s health. They know he can’t get really stressed out. They know he takes medication to stay alive. They know we have a future full of doctor’s appointments, surgeries, and a high probability of a father who dies young. Patrick and I have agreed that it's better to keep them aware now than to let it catch them off guard later. They are smart kids. We wouldn’t do that to them. The ten-year-old did go back to her bedroom but didn’t go back to sleep while I let the paramedics in and found my glasses. By then Patrick was fine; fully recovered from the event and ready to put it behind him. The medics checked him out, stuck electrodes to him, took readings and compared notes. Whatever they saw on the papers coming out of their machines told them he was in the clear. That didn’t matter one bit to me. I wanted him to go in. I wanted him to go to the hospital where I knew he would get the proper care. All I knew was I had just watched my husband come close to dying, and he was telling the paramedics he didn’t need them to bring him in. I. Was. Furious. The evening had been traumatic, to say the least. His face as his eyes rolled back into his head flashed into my vision again and again. The agony of feeling his life was slipping away filtered through my blood - the adrenaline waning but the anguish fully present. And he didn’t want them to take him in? He was being absurd. Ridiculous. An idiot. I wanted to rail at him. Our fourteen-year-old came out of her room and I ushered her back in, telling her Daddy had had a heart episode and was refusing to go to the hospital. I told her he was fine but that he was being stubborn. But oh, the thing I wanted to say instead. There are some words our kids have never heard come out of my mouth, but I wanted to say them at that moment. I left her in there and went back out to the kitchen, but gone were the usual smiles I had for the medics. I couldn’t even pretend. I made sure they had the information they needed - Patrick’s current list of medications; who his primary care doctor was - and I left the room. There was nothing I could have said that would have prompted him to go to the hospital. We were back in bed at 11:45pm. The two-year-old had never woken up. He was a good buffer between us in bed. I think I could have strangled Patrick for not going in, as strange as that sounds. But I couldn’t sleep. My mind wouldn’t quiet. Words and sentences and conversations floated around, begging to be written down. It was an interesting phenomena - my emotions screaming at me to be recorded on paper. This is what I jotted down: “The highs are high, and the lows can be unbelievably low. Between the moments where seemingly innumerable obligations and responsibilities tug, pull, and yank on me from all directions, threatening to tear me into a thousand pieces, I've come to appreciate the monotonous moments of contentment. “The cup of coffee in the morning in the silence before anyone else has awoken. The short period of time after I’ve left a store and I’m sitting in the truck, groceries loaded, a song from my childhood serendipitously playing on the radio. When I look out our living room window at our incredibly bland view and enjoy the peacefulness of living the rural life. “Tonight, however, was an unimaginable low.” I knew it was the start of a blog post, but honestly I haven’t felt like writing about this until now. The turmoil going through my mind as I thought he lost consciousness while I was on the phone with 911, was too raw. Too big. Last night we had a really hard conversation. I started it, but I needed to. I needed to ask him hard questions and to hear his thoughts. I wish I had recorded it, because it’s not a conversation many couples are forced to have. I asked him how he was going to decide when it was time to go to Seattle. He has doctors up here saying living his life to the fullest, and wait until the last possible moment to go to Seattle for the heart transplant. But he has doctors in Seattle saying do it now; don’t wait. Take that leap of faith because we don’t know when his heart will decide it has had enough. How hard must it be, I wonder, to feel like staying here is a death sentence, and that at the same time making the commitment to have a heart transplant could also be a death sentence? The ultimate, “Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.” That choosing to go to Seattle could be, without us knowing, choosing to end his life? Because heart transplants aren’t a guarantee. Things go wrong. Bodies give out - during surgery, after surgery, during recovery, etc. It happens. Not every heart transplant is a wonderful answer to what was previously a horribly unhealthy, uncomfortable life. In Patrick’s case, for instance, he is not living that sort of life. Certainly, he can’t eat big meals because it makes him feel sick, and the slightest overage of sodium causes him to question, is this it? Is this how it ends? He can’t ride the Slingshot at the fair with his kids. He can’t go on roller coasters. Ziplining is probably out of the question. Adrenaline isn’t his friend. We have to choose where we live in terms of how long it takes to get onto the highway and to the hospital. We can’t go on overnight hikes into the wilderness. In fact, a two or three hour hike away from the road system makes us nervous. That all really sucks, because if someone were to meet Patrick on the street for the first time they would assume he is healthy. Patrick has an almost invisible disability. As of right now Patrick has decided to stay here. I pointed out that that is essentially letting the decision be taken from him. One day his heart might decide to stop, and he will have given up the opportunity for a heart transplant because he has chosen to live out the rest of his life with his family, whatever quality and quantity of life that might be. Or his heart could become so sick that he has no choice but to go. Those are the options he has chosen. Even I can’t see making the choice to move to Seattle temporarily while waiting for a transplant, while he can still ride a bike with his younger children here; or while he can fly to Arizona and see his older kids and enjoy his grandbabies. It’s like a horrible game of Risk. Which risk is too great? Which risk is acceptable? In the meantime, we live life as normal as possible. I complain about his shoes leaving dirt throughout the house, and he complains that I haven’t washed his blue shirt. I ask him to handle breakfast so I can shower in peace, and he asks that I make his favorite salad dressing while he’s at work. I want to thank each and every one of you for being on this journey with us. I don’t write these posts for sympathy, or to showcase Patrick’s troubles. I write because it helps me. It’s therapeutic. And I have another avenue to complain about my terribly annoying husband. Before I forget… Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Patrick should have died. A heart in as poor condition as his shouldn’t have the ability to survive such stress. So instead of shocking him back into normal rhythm at 170 beats per minute, they lowered that to (I think) 160. I wasn’t at the appointment, so I’m not exactly sure of the numbers. They changed both the pacemaker settings and the defibrillator settings, but Patrick couldn’t remember which was which, or both sets of numbers. But I do know he will likely be shocked more often, with the lowering of those settings. And the heart doesn’t like to be shocked, but it likes dying even less. Another damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t scenario. So, when something of note happens I will write about it here. Hug your loves ones. You have no idea how long you have with them.
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