Anxiety in April

Stace, ,


“Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths.”

– C.H. Spurgeon

Regular readers will be aware that at the start of the year I set up a list of words as subjects to write a post on, one for each month, during this year. This came about from a suggestion by my blogging buddy Marquesa and now I am faced with the word for April, anxiety, which had me a little stumped. I don’t consider myself an anxious person and I can’t presume to write accurately about anxiety and its effects in other people, evidenced by the number of courses offered to assist people suffering from crippling anxiety. While I am contemplating what to write the universe as usual rises to the challenge and presents me the lessons I need to learn.

At about three am on Good Friday morning I am woken with a dizzy feeling in my head, a maelstrom of sensations, strange dreams, nay hallucinations, and panting for breath, all sufficient to drag me out of sleep and sitting up in bed fighting off severe nausea. I reach for a plastic bag I keep in my bedside drawer for just such an occasion but I am unable to vomit. Ahhh food poisoning I think. Gradually the nausea eases off and I lay down to go back to sleep. But the dizzy feeling persists and I have cycles of shortness of breath. I struggle to get control of what is happening and as I do I try something I occasionally do in meditation and that is to focus on my third eye. As I do a white light appears in my consciousness and I start to feel more in control of the bouts of dizziness and shortness of breath as they repeat. It is about six am by this time when I notice a sharp pain going diagonally across the centre of my chest. Maybe this is a little more serious than food poisoning I think. At that point I call out to my wife that it might be time to call an ambulance.

The ambulance arrives and immediately calls for another ambulance with cardiac drugs aboard. They hook me up to a device which shows my heart rate at 20, not too far from there to zero I realise. This might be serious. As the next ambulance arrives the new crew take over and administer some drugs which obviously stabilises my position. They take me out to the ambulance in a wheel chair and off I go to Westmead Hospital.

My first day in Westmead is a blur of nurses and doctors, all doing their utmost to keep this old fella alive, along with multiple intravenous drips of life-saving and restorative drugs. I also become familiar with previously unfamiliar territory, the operating theatre, making three trips there in short succession getting a temporary pacemaker inserted correctly. These were all done under local anaesthetic and consisted of inserting a wire up from an insertion point in my groin area. It was fascinating to watch the progress of this on a giant screen just above my head, the dark line of the wire moving up through my torso to a position around my heart. I watch in awe at the amazing skill of the surgeons involved.

After the temporary, external pacemaker was installed my heart settled into a regular beat pattern and some of the urgency and anxiety was removed from my situation. Briefly. I was instructed to not sit upright as there was a danger of the internal wire becoming buckled and causing the temporary pacemaker to fail. However a day or two later a physio came in to give me some recovery assistance and the first thing she did was say “Now lets sit you up” and pulled me into a sitting position ignoring my protest that I wasn’t supposed to sit upright. I immediately went very dizzy and passed out as the pacemaker wire buckled. My wife happened to be visiting and she later told me that I was heard to say “I’m dizzy” and as she looked at my screen monitor I flatlined and “coded” which means my heart rate went to zero. Molly also said they had a crash cart standing by just outside the door but fortunately one of the doctors or nurses who was already in the room was able to tweak the settings on the external pacemaker to bring my heart rate back. I was back lying flat on the bed by this stage as an embarrassed physio left the scene. As I regained consciousness and learnt what had happened I came to the frightening realisation that my old heart was done and could no longer operate unassisted. Another slap of anxiety from the universe. I was literally a dead man walking.

Various other tests and scans later and back to theatre I go to get my internal pacemaker installed and I became what I saw as version 2 of myself. My heart rate was now a steady 71 but I wasn’t out of the woods yet. The doctors then informed me tests had shown that I had numerous blockages in the blood flow through my heart and I would require a triple arterial bypass operation on my heart, commonly referred to as a CABG.However this would be delayed for a couple of weeks to allow me some recovery time from my current challenges. Until then they sent me home ten days after the heart attack with a pack of 8 different medications and an appointment with the CABG surgeon on the next day.

I was starting to feel more hopeful after my visit to Dr Himanschu Desai the heart surgeon on the Tuesday, albeit after some “negotiation” about his standard fee. He explained the risks involved in the operation which were offset by the potential of a better quality of life after a successful CABG operation on a pacemaker driven heart. I gladly signed the consent papers for the operation with little trepidation about undergoing major surgery.

But the universe hadn’t finished with my lessons yet. For the next six weeks, all manner of things conspired to delay my CABG operation. Firstly over the next week I became weaker and became prone to dizzy attacks which progressed to a state where my wife insisted on calling an ambulance again for me. I was taken into Blacktown Hospital where I was diagnosed with “systemic anaemia”, A gastroscope revealed that I had been bleeding internally from a number of small ulcers on my stomach wall. They sealed these during the gastroscope to hopefully prevent any further bleeding. Apparently amidst the swarth of drugs I was sent home from Westmead with were a number of blood-thinning agents to prepare me for the CABG but these same drugs appeared to have set off the bleeding in my stomach ulcers such that my haemoglobin level was 77 when it should have been upwards of 120 at least. One nurse berated me with “didn’t you notice your stools were black” which is apparently a sure sign sign of internal bleeding. I responded with “yes I did but I put that down to the effect of all the new drugs I was taking”. I then received four blood transfusions and was informed that the CABG would have to wait for two weeks after the bleeding was confirmed as healed. So began a poo watch for the colour to return to something like normal so that we could be confident that the bleeding had stopped. I also began to take a keener interest in the results of my daily blood tests to see if the haemoglobin level was increasing, another sign of healing. Strange days indeed. One small benefit though, I was taken off telemetry which meant that I no longer had to carry around this electronic box that was connected to multiple monitors on my body and sent the results electronically to the monitoring equipment. It was somewhat of a nuisance relief.

Two days before the end of the two-week period after the bleeding stopped a new patient was wheeled into the bed next to me. He subsequently tested positive for COVID so they wheeled me off to isolation for a week. Another delay but I did have a room and a bathroom all to myself at least.

Now the first toe, next to big toe, on my right foot swelled up with the effects of gout and finally burst open in a couple of places. As I have little sensations in my toes due to diabetic damage this was only a cause of a little discomfort but they sent me off a scan anyway. It was then revealed that the bone in the toe had become infected and I would either need an amputation of the toe to prevent spreading to other bones or months and months of antibiotic treatment with no guarantee of success and an indefinite postponement of my CABG. Did I really need this toe other than to help with wearing thong sandals? It seemed an easy choice to make given the options. I finished isolation on the Sunday with no signs of COVID and on the Monday in I went for surgery to remove my toe.

Three days of antibiotics followed then on Friday, finally, I went in for my CABG operation. Two weeks later I was home recuperating almost exactly two months after my initial heart attack. Enough with the anxiety lessons thank you universe.

By the way, I have three pairs of thong sandals, size 9, going free to a good home.

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