- Joined
- Jul 14, 2005
- Messages
- 293
- Reaction score
- 136
- Location
- The Land of Cotton
- Website
- www.lesiavalentine.com
I am lying on a padded table, soaked with sweat, shivering so violently it must appear that I’m having a seizure. I don’t look at myself. My gaze wanders across the ceiling, the lights, the faces darting in and out of my peripheral vision. I am focusing only on the sensations of my body. Someone draws blood from my arm. Normally terrified of needles, there is too much happening around me to give it more thought.
“Miss Valentine, you’re having a heart attack,” a male voice says. I barely glance in his direction. “On a scale of one to ten, with one being the least and ten being the worst, how is your pain?”
It is not at all what I expect. There is no elephant sitting on my chest. There is no golf ball lodged in my throat. There is only an angry, clenched fist squeezing my heart. It makes me feel incompetent and unworthy of complaining. I try to rate it fairly. “Six, maybe,” I say. Wondering if I am going to die, I watch for the tunnel that will lead me to the light, and the faces of loved ones who have gone before me, but there is nothing. I surrender my body to whatever comes. “Where is my husband?” I ask. “I want him.” I may have something to say to him before I go.
A woman tells me she is going to cut off my nightgown. Not waiting for my protest, she snips the straps, then gathers the silky fabric from the bottom until it is bunched in her hand above my chest. She begins working her scissors. I am naked underneath, and someone covers me with a sheet from the waist down.
Other hands place suction cups on my chest: one on each side below my collarbones, one just above my solar plexus, one below my left breast, another on the right, below where my gall bladder resides. A cuff is fastened around my upper arm. A clamp goes over my finger. It has a glowing red light, and I think ET, phone home.
“Do you have a history of coronary disease?” the man asks.
“My mother.”
“Diabetes?”
“Mother.”
“High blood pressure?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cancer?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you smoke?”
“I just quit.”
“When?”
“About thirty minutes ago.”
He has probably heard this joke a thousand times. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even pause. “How much?”
“A pack a day.”
“Do you drink?”
“Occasionally.”
“Have you had any alcohol today?”
“No.”
“When did your symptoms begin?”
“About thirty minutes ago.”
“What were the symptoms?”
“I felt weak. Nauseous.”
“Did you vomit?”
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
I look over at him. He is watching my heart beat on a monitor as he waits for my answer. There were those first few times in the front bathroom. I thought I would feel better. I always feel better after I throw up. I tried to recall what I had eaten and wondered if my husband felt sick, too. It was three or three-thirty in the morning and he had to get up in two hours. He was sleeping soundly, but I felt horrible, and secretly hoped he would come to my aid. I crawled by the room where he’d slept since we decided to divorce, and called his name through the closed door. “Do you feel sick?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. He didn’t ask why I wanted to know.
“I’m sick,” I said. I crawled into our bedroom and onto the bed, but didn’t feel better, and I rolled off, lunging toward the master bathroom to keep from tossing my cookies on the floor. I didn’t feel like cleaning up a mess. On my knees, I raised the lid of the toilet and vomited a few more times. Sweat beaded on my skin, drenching me as if I had been standing in a shower. A shower was not a bad idea, I thought. Maybe it would make me feel better. Struggling to reach the faucet handles, I managed to turn one. The blast of cold water did nothing to help. I lay with my face pressed to the cool tile of the shower floor and called my husband again. He must have detected enough panic in my voice that he came. “I’m so sick,” I said. “I need you to call the hospital and tell them my symptoms. See what they say.”
He left and returned with a phone book, sat on the bed, and tried to find a number for the hospital. I felt the squeeze on my heart. “Forget that. Call 911.”
He looked at me like I was crazy.
“I’m telling you, I’m sick! Call 911.”
He stood. “I can get you there faster.”
“Fine.” I didn’t want to waste time arguing about it. “Grab my purse from under my desk. It has my insurance card in it.” He headed for my office, and I began to crawl through the bedroom. From the hall, I watched him search for my purse. I saw it under my desk, where it lives. “It’s right there!” I shouted.
“Where?”
“Bend over and look. It’s right there under my desk. I’m looking right at it.” He looked, and still didn’t see it. I began to get frustrated. “It’s pink and yellow! It has bamboo handles and looks Chinese. It’s right there!” He finally found it, set it on the desk, and began to rummage through it, looking for my insurance card. “Just bring it,” I whined. “I know where it is. I need to go. Now.”
Mad at me for yelling at him, he let me crawl the rest of the way down the hall and through the living room. He opened the front door, and I crawled across the porch, and down the sidewalk until I reached the driveway where his truck was parked. Managing to stand, I opened the tailgate, and climbed into the bed.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Just get me to the fucking hospital,” I snapped. I braced myself for the bumps in the road and watched treetops and streetlights whiz by. I knew instinctively which stop signs he ran, and exactly where we were by the turns he made. At the hospital, he ran in and reappeared with a wheelchair. I’m sure my jaw dropped.
“They said if I can’t get you out of the truck, they don’t know how I expect them to,” he offered by way of explanation. A car pulled up behind us, and I wondered if it was police, but I couldn’t see past the glare of its headlights. I crawled out of the truck and fell into the chair. Once inside, I didn’t have to wait. Someone took control and wheeled me into an inner room, stopping in front of a scale, and told me to hop on.
“I can’t.”
“You have to. We have to know your weight.”
I tumbled from the chair and lay on the scale in a fetal ball. One hundred and thirty-five pounds. I need to diet if I live.
“How many times did you vomit?” the man asks again, bringing me back to the present.
I realize he is the doctor. “Six or seven,” I answer, wishing I could brush my teeth now.
“Do you have a living will or any medical directives?”
Damn. “No.” I’ve always meant to do that, but have never gotten around to it.
“Lift your tongue,” a woman says, and I expect a thermometer. “This is nitro glycerin. Let it dissolve.” I have heard of this before. Never in a million years would I expect to have any of it under my own tongue. Suddenly there’s a person on either side of me, inserting IV feeds into each of my arms. A man easily slides a tube the size of a swizzle stick into my right arm, but the woman on my left is having a hard time of it. I scream. Jesus Christ! She tries again. Fuck! I look over to see what her problem is. She says she must have hit a nerve, and wiggles the tube around again to prove it. I think I’m going to get off the table and kill her. A woman standing beside her takes over.
“How is the pain now?” the nitro woman asks.
“Still six.” It hasn’t let up, and now I have a pain in my arm, too. She puts another tiny pill under my tongue.
A man comes to stand at my left. “I have to shave you,” he informs me, but with a reassuring voice, as if he’s waiting for my consent. “They’re going to make an incision in your groin for a catheter.” I know just what he’s talking about. My mother had it done. They snaked a tube up the artery in her leg until they reached her heart. She’d almost died. From the next room, I’d heard the doctor yelling at her, “Stay with me. Stay with me.” The shave takes less than ten seconds. I am already neatly trimmed. I close my eyes and the dark canvas behind them spins. The tunnel, I think, but no; it’s a snowflake. I want to be cognizant if I leave my body. I’m focused on that. I wait.
“How’s the pain?” nitro nurse asks again.
It’s less, I think. A five. A four, maybe. She puts more nitro under my tongue.
“Let’s get ready to lift,” the doctor directs, and they all surround me. Someone says, “go,” and they lift the sheet under me, just like on TV. I float through the air for a brief moment and land on a gurney. They are off and running. The lights on the ceiling above me speed by like the dotted line on a highway. An elevator door opens and I am wheeled in. A moment later, I am wheeled out. I float again. I see a monitor on my left, nothing more. A cool liquid antiseptic is applied to my groin. I think about how I don’t like the word groin. It sounds nasty. I hear the surgeon’s voice say, “I’ve got two and a half minutes. Let’s go.” I can tell by his accent that he’s from India. I fade to black.
I awaken in a glass room. The nurse’s desk is just outside. The door is open, and I hear activity out there, voices and footsteps. Someone drops a metal object that rings out. In the other direction, I see it’s still dark outside. I’m glad I don’t smell hospital smells. The bed I’m lying in hums as it shifts slightly, like a wave in a waterbed. I’m still tethered to the IV and suction cups. When I move, the top line of the monitor squiggles. I raise my hand a few times when I discover the correlation. An oxygen tube rests beneath my nose. I’m still ET. The blood pressure cuff huffs and puffs and tightens around my arm, then gives a deep sigh. Still adrift in the land of nod, I hear my husband saying that I need my rest and he’ll come back later. I am vaguely aware of the doctor’s presence. He congratulates me for making it to the hospital in time, and explains what he’s done to me, but only a few words stick: massive heart attack, widowmaker, stent. There’s a second blockage in the back of my heart that is unreachable. It is only pumping at 40%. Then he is gone, and I am left alone to contemplate my mortality, and the year from hell that has led me here. Stress is a killer.
“How are you feeling?”
Two nurses, one male, one female are at my bedside, watching the monitor, checking the EKG wires.
“Fine,” I yawn. Sleeping great until they ran in here. I wonder why they always wake up people who are sick.
“Are you having any pain now?”
I check. I think I feel relatively well for someone in intensive care.
“Your heart stopped,” the man says.
“You set off alarms at the desk,” the woman adds.
“Really? Huh. I was sleeping. I didn’t feel a thing.”
They fuss over me until they’re satisfied I’m still alive. I’m not at all uneasy. It seems it would have been a quick and painless death. Nothing to it. I close my eyes and go back to sleep.
On the third day, the cardiologist brings a medical student with him when he comes to release me from the hospital. He sits on the bed to write prescriptions, and asks me to recount the symptoms of my heart attack for the student. I realize that until now, I have left out the first symptom, an odd one indeed. The very first thing I recall happening was suddenly being filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. I had known without a doubt that something terrible was about to happen. It was as if a dementer were kissing me. All light fled from my life, and a real fear descended. The cardiologist is not surprised. It’s not the first time he’s heard this, but his eyes are filled with a sudden interest they’ve not had until now. Since I have no near death experience to recall, it will have to do.
Update September 1, 2007
In light of everyone's encouragement to aim for publication of this: I know I don't have to remind you writers, but for any non-writers who may be directed here by friends, please remember this is copyrighted material. Please do not copy it and send it around in e-mails or post to your blog. I will get very mad.
“Miss Valentine, you’re having a heart attack,” a male voice says. I barely glance in his direction. “On a scale of one to ten, with one being the least and ten being the worst, how is your pain?”
It is not at all what I expect. There is no elephant sitting on my chest. There is no golf ball lodged in my throat. There is only an angry, clenched fist squeezing my heart. It makes me feel incompetent and unworthy of complaining. I try to rate it fairly. “Six, maybe,” I say. Wondering if I am going to die, I watch for the tunnel that will lead me to the light, and the faces of loved ones who have gone before me, but there is nothing. I surrender my body to whatever comes. “Where is my husband?” I ask. “I want him.” I may have something to say to him before I go.
A woman tells me she is going to cut off my nightgown. Not waiting for my protest, she snips the straps, then gathers the silky fabric from the bottom until it is bunched in her hand above my chest. She begins working her scissors. I am naked underneath, and someone covers me with a sheet from the waist down.
Other hands place suction cups on my chest: one on each side below my collarbones, one just above my solar plexus, one below my left breast, another on the right, below where my gall bladder resides. A cuff is fastened around my upper arm. A clamp goes over my finger. It has a glowing red light, and I think ET, phone home.
“Do you have a history of coronary disease?” the man asks.
“My mother.”
“Diabetes?”
“Mother.”
“High blood pressure?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cancer?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you smoke?”
“I just quit.”
“When?”
“About thirty minutes ago.”
He has probably heard this joke a thousand times. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even pause. “How much?”
“A pack a day.”
“Do you drink?”
“Occasionally.”
“Have you had any alcohol today?”
“No.”
“When did your symptoms begin?”
“About thirty minutes ago.”
“What were the symptoms?”
“I felt weak. Nauseous.”
“Did you vomit?”
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
I look over at him. He is watching my heart beat on a monitor as he waits for my answer. There were those first few times in the front bathroom. I thought I would feel better. I always feel better after I throw up. I tried to recall what I had eaten and wondered if my husband felt sick, too. It was three or three-thirty in the morning and he had to get up in two hours. He was sleeping soundly, but I felt horrible, and secretly hoped he would come to my aid. I crawled by the room where he’d slept since we decided to divorce, and called his name through the closed door. “Do you feel sick?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. He didn’t ask why I wanted to know.
“I’m sick,” I said. I crawled into our bedroom and onto the bed, but didn’t feel better, and I rolled off, lunging toward the master bathroom to keep from tossing my cookies on the floor. I didn’t feel like cleaning up a mess. On my knees, I raised the lid of the toilet and vomited a few more times. Sweat beaded on my skin, drenching me as if I had been standing in a shower. A shower was not a bad idea, I thought. Maybe it would make me feel better. Struggling to reach the faucet handles, I managed to turn one. The blast of cold water did nothing to help. I lay with my face pressed to the cool tile of the shower floor and called my husband again. He must have detected enough panic in my voice that he came. “I’m so sick,” I said. “I need you to call the hospital and tell them my symptoms. See what they say.”
He left and returned with a phone book, sat on the bed, and tried to find a number for the hospital. I felt the squeeze on my heart. “Forget that. Call 911.”
He looked at me like I was crazy.
“I’m telling you, I’m sick! Call 911.”
He stood. “I can get you there faster.”
“Fine.” I didn’t want to waste time arguing about it. “Grab my purse from under my desk. It has my insurance card in it.” He headed for my office, and I began to crawl through the bedroom. From the hall, I watched him search for my purse. I saw it under my desk, where it lives. “It’s right there!” I shouted.
“Where?”
“Bend over and look. It’s right there under my desk. I’m looking right at it.” He looked, and still didn’t see it. I began to get frustrated. “It’s pink and yellow! It has bamboo handles and looks Chinese. It’s right there!” He finally found it, set it on the desk, and began to rummage through it, looking for my insurance card. “Just bring it,” I whined. “I know where it is. I need to go. Now.”
Mad at me for yelling at him, he let me crawl the rest of the way down the hall and through the living room. He opened the front door, and I crawled across the porch, and down the sidewalk until I reached the driveway where his truck was parked. Managing to stand, I opened the tailgate, and climbed into the bed.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Just get me to the fucking hospital,” I snapped. I braced myself for the bumps in the road and watched treetops and streetlights whiz by. I knew instinctively which stop signs he ran, and exactly where we were by the turns he made. At the hospital, he ran in and reappeared with a wheelchair. I’m sure my jaw dropped.
“They said if I can’t get you out of the truck, they don’t know how I expect them to,” he offered by way of explanation. A car pulled up behind us, and I wondered if it was police, but I couldn’t see past the glare of its headlights. I crawled out of the truck and fell into the chair. Once inside, I didn’t have to wait. Someone took control and wheeled me into an inner room, stopping in front of a scale, and told me to hop on.
“I can’t.”
“You have to. We have to know your weight.”
I tumbled from the chair and lay on the scale in a fetal ball. One hundred and thirty-five pounds. I need to diet if I live.
“How many times did you vomit?” the man asks again, bringing me back to the present.
I realize he is the doctor. “Six or seven,” I answer, wishing I could brush my teeth now.
“Do you have a living will or any medical directives?”
Damn. “No.” I’ve always meant to do that, but have never gotten around to it.
“Lift your tongue,” a woman says, and I expect a thermometer. “This is nitro glycerin. Let it dissolve.” I have heard of this before. Never in a million years would I expect to have any of it under my own tongue. Suddenly there’s a person on either side of me, inserting IV feeds into each of my arms. A man easily slides a tube the size of a swizzle stick into my right arm, but the woman on my left is having a hard time of it. I scream. Jesus Christ! She tries again. Fuck! I look over to see what her problem is. She says she must have hit a nerve, and wiggles the tube around again to prove it. I think I’m going to get off the table and kill her. A woman standing beside her takes over.
“How is the pain now?” the nitro woman asks.
“Still six.” It hasn’t let up, and now I have a pain in my arm, too. She puts another tiny pill under my tongue.
A man comes to stand at my left. “I have to shave you,” he informs me, but with a reassuring voice, as if he’s waiting for my consent. “They’re going to make an incision in your groin for a catheter.” I know just what he’s talking about. My mother had it done. They snaked a tube up the artery in her leg until they reached her heart. She’d almost died. From the next room, I’d heard the doctor yelling at her, “Stay with me. Stay with me.” The shave takes less than ten seconds. I am already neatly trimmed. I close my eyes and the dark canvas behind them spins. The tunnel, I think, but no; it’s a snowflake. I want to be cognizant if I leave my body. I’m focused on that. I wait.
“How’s the pain?” nitro nurse asks again.
It’s less, I think. A five. A four, maybe. She puts more nitro under my tongue.
“Let’s get ready to lift,” the doctor directs, and they all surround me. Someone says, “go,” and they lift the sheet under me, just like on TV. I float through the air for a brief moment and land on a gurney. They are off and running. The lights on the ceiling above me speed by like the dotted line on a highway. An elevator door opens and I am wheeled in. A moment later, I am wheeled out. I float again. I see a monitor on my left, nothing more. A cool liquid antiseptic is applied to my groin. I think about how I don’t like the word groin. It sounds nasty. I hear the surgeon’s voice say, “I’ve got two and a half minutes. Let’s go.” I can tell by his accent that he’s from India. I fade to black.
I awaken in a glass room. The nurse’s desk is just outside. The door is open, and I hear activity out there, voices and footsteps. Someone drops a metal object that rings out. In the other direction, I see it’s still dark outside. I’m glad I don’t smell hospital smells. The bed I’m lying in hums as it shifts slightly, like a wave in a waterbed. I’m still tethered to the IV and suction cups. When I move, the top line of the monitor squiggles. I raise my hand a few times when I discover the correlation. An oxygen tube rests beneath my nose. I’m still ET. The blood pressure cuff huffs and puffs and tightens around my arm, then gives a deep sigh. Still adrift in the land of nod, I hear my husband saying that I need my rest and he’ll come back later. I am vaguely aware of the doctor’s presence. He congratulates me for making it to the hospital in time, and explains what he’s done to me, but only a few words stick: massive heart attack, widowmaker, stent. There’s a second blockage in the back of my heart that is unreachable. It is only pumping at 40%. Then he is gone, and I am left alone to contemplate my mortality, and the year from hell that has led me here. Stress is a killer.
“How are you feeling?”
Two nurses, one male, one female are at my bedside, watching the monitor, checking the EKG wires.
“Fine,” I yawn. Sleeping great until they ran in here. I wonder why they always wake up people who are sick.
“Are you having any pain now?”
I check. I think I feel relatively well for someone in intensive care.
“Your heart stopped,” the man says.
“You set off alarms at the desk,” the woman adds.
“Really? Huh. I was sleeping. I didn’t feel a thing.”
They fuss over me until they’re satisfied I’m still alive. I’m not at all uneasy. It seems it would have been a quick and painless death. Nothing to it. I close my eyes and go back to sleep.
On the third day, the cardiologist brings a medical student with him when he comes to release me from the hospital. He sits on the bed to write prescriptions, and asks me to recount the symptoms of my heart attack for the student. I realize that until now, I have left out the first symptom, an odd one indeed. The very first thing I recall happening was suddenly being filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. I had known without a doubt that something terrible was about to happen. It was as if a dementer were kissing me. All light fled from my life, and a real fear descended. The cardiologist is not surprised. It’s not the first time he’s heard this, but his eyes are filled with a sudden interest they’ve not had until now. Since I have no near death experience to recall, it will have to do.
Update September 1, 2007
In light of everyone's encouragement to aim for publication of this: I know I don't have to remind you writers, but for any non-writers who may be directed here by friends, please remember this is copyrighted material. Please do not copy it and send it around in e-mails or post to your blog. I will get very mad.
Last edited:
Why were you awake???
