On April 15 2024, around 5:30 pm, I took out the garbage and recycling, something that required two 15-yard-long round trips from the back of my lot to the curb. The first trip took some effort and left me winded, with a little pain in my chest. At the end of the second trip, I thought I was going to collapse from the pain in my chest. I slowly dragged myself inside, sat in our recliner, and drank some water. I checked my Apple Watch repeatedly, watching my heart rate slowly fall from the mid-130s to just above 100. The pain ebbed as my heart rate dropped, but didn’t stop. Breathing was an effort. Something was clearly wrong.
My partner returned from walking the dog around 10 minutes later to find me in the chair, looked at me and said “are you ok?” Until that question, I’d been negotiating internally, talking myself out of the obvious, sure that things would work themselves out. But as I looked back at her, I heard the words come out of my mouth and I knew that I both wanted to say them and that life had changed. “We need to go to the hospital.”
4 hours later, I was in an ICU room at University of Michigan Hospital recovering from surgery. Dr Sukul, who had clearly been on his way home, had been pulled back to save my life. He put a 48mm-long stent in my left anterior descending artery, removing and re-opening a 90+% blockage. I’ve seen the video of him working. I lost 40% of the function of the lower chamber of my heart, likely permanently.
I’d had a STEMI, an ST-elevation myocardial infarction, a fairly dangerous type of heart attack. It’s not the widow maker, but it’s close enough.
A lifetime of poot diet, alcohol, and sitting on my ass had caught up with me. I’d been given a renewal of my lease on life, through nothing more than the happenstance of living near enough to one of the premier medical institutions in the world. Not that many years ago, I may not have survived due to a lack of facilities; I had hours to live.
And so, today, I sit at the same desk, the same computer, typing with the same fingers I stared at in an ER triage bay as an RN asked me what my advance directives were. I have completed cardiac therapy, joined a gym (and actually go), changed my diet, and lost 35-ish pounds. My PCP shows me numbers that fit into ranges that people like. I have smaller clothes. I lift weights. I can run for two and a half minutes, 5 times, in a half hour.
I’m “healthy”.
I’m still here.
I’m lucky, something that, in retrospect, I’ve always felt. But only in retrospect. I can never go into a situation feeling luck is on my side. Only in hindsight do I think “oh, wow, that was lucky.”
I don’t have great insights from the experience, only lessons I have to live with forever. I have drugs (sorry “medications”), tests, and a growing hate for push notifications from apps that track appointments and tests and meals and blood sugar and blood pressure and dosages and… yeah
But I’m here. I’m glad to be here. The alternative isn’t attractive.
Yet…
I wait for the other shoe to drop every day. I don’t know that there is one, but now I wait. I have a family history that is not great. No one seems to think it matters. Tests say I don’t have genetic markers. Other things aren’t genetically inherited.
Yet..
Again, I don’t have lessons to impart here. Be thankful for the time you have. Tell the people you care about, no matter how platonic they are, how you feel. My near-miss was arterial plaque. It could have easily been an F350 driven by someone on their phone.
I’m not dead. Not yet. I’m still here.
“If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
― Catherine Aird
Leave a Reply