The Crash Cart
The waiting is the worst. Getting hooked up to a crash cart is not as scary as it sounds and pales beside the indefinite space of not knowing.
Whenever the heart is the culprit, the clock is ticking. The ER staff hooks you up faster than any television show. EKG leads, blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, temperature, blood draw, urine samples, an IV, and, of course, the crash cart.
The crash cart pads come in pairs. One goes down on your left side about halfway between the armpit and the waist—assuming your heart is on the left. The other goes on your right chest below your collarbone.
According to the monitors, my pulse was bouncing between 150 and 45 in less than a minute. The real story was different. My heart wasn’t changing that fast; extra beats were confusing the count. That scrambling, hollow feeling in my chest was my heart’s upper chamber getting jiggy with itself. This was AFib.
I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be scared of AFib. I did know that blood clots can deliver the kill shot.
They don’t let you drink water—or anything else—in the case of tests or emergency procedures. I was thirsty enough to drink an entire water cooler dry. Because the local hospital does not have any cardiologists, I was to be transferred to the next big town. Nourishment was unimportant to everyone but me.
The crash pads became my security blanket in the ER and during transport. When I got to the hospital cardiac floor, I refused to let them be removed until the treatment plan was in force. The next day I peeled them off myself.
The waiting doesn’t stop after you get a room. Every day, twenty-four hours a day, every hour, a nurse logs another set of vital signs. The boredom is real—the infinite repetition of nothing and everything happening at once. But there is food—and water. An oasis of sorts. One I’d rather not have needed.
The usual episodic TV binging is inescapable and amplifies the ennui. The off button is effective at killing the screen, but not the second hand marking every minute of every hour of every day. I was able to get out of bed and amble the corridors several times. Some people can’t.
I have great empathy for those confined to their beds, the ones who seem to have more tubes than openings, the patients who may not go home, and the one who was afraid to go home.
Maybe the craziest part of this is that there was never any physical pain.
Coming Home.
On the third day, my treatment had progressed sufficiently and I was discharged. It felt more like liberation. Freed from the creeping pace of hospital time.
I can’t say that I left unaltered.
We have three very large dogs. Two of them individually weigh more than I do. They were glad to see me, but it had been so hot, they were unwilling to be excitable. The cats have their own agenda, and we do not speak of it.
Home was home. We built this place from a shell. It is the place we made for ourselves.
Yesterday, walking into the house, I saw the place through my wife’s eyes. My boots on the hearth waiting for me to put them on, the mandolin silent. Just like I left them. I saw my house absent myself, and I did not like it.
She has a story to tell that deserves you to read her words. I will prod her a bit for your sake.
Today we worked in the yard and did the things we normally do. We were monumentally more glad that we were doing it together.
