My scary week, Part 1
Imagine you're riding in a car being driven by your friend Frank. Now imagine that a drunk driver broadsides your car on Frank's side so that he's knocked unconscious. An ambulance arrives and takes everyone to the hospital. You walk away with a few bruises. Frank is okay except that he might be a little loopy for a day or two. When you call Frank's wife to let her know what happened, it's a bad idea to say, "Kelli, we were broadsided by a drunk driver. The doctors have Frank under observation right now." It's better and more sensitive to say, "Kelli, everything's okay. Frank and I are both fine, but we were in a car accident. Frank got knocked on the head, so he's a little out of it, but the doctors say he's going to be perfectly all right." The first statement allows Kelli's worst fears to run wild in her imagination and devastate her emotionally. The second puts the accident in perspective so that Kelli knows right up front that nothing is seriously wrong.
In that spirit, I should say right up front that everything's okay. I'm fine, but last week I went to the emergency room with symptoms of a heart attack.
My wife and I had been planning a trip to Arizona for a mini-family reunion. We were set to leave on Saturday, May 29, and return on Wednesday, June 2. We had one small problem, though, in that I have been experiencing irregular heartbeats with increasing frequency for the past couple of months. Thursday night, the premature ventricular contractions (as I later learned to call the irregular beats, or PVCs) were stronger and more frequent than any I had ever experienced. When a PVC occurs, I feel as though my heart stops beating for a split second then resumes, sort of like a car engine missing on a cylinder or two. Thursday night, I developed a fear that my heart would stop and not be able to start again. The fear wasn't bad enough for me to call an ambulance, but it did prompt me to visit my cardiologist's office on Friday.
The cardiologist's assistant said they would order a device that would record my heartbeats so that they could see the phenomenon and evaluate it. She also told me I should be okay traveling to Arizona. So Mrs. Happy and I packed up and got on the plane Saturday morning. I still harbored some fear about my heart stopping. I also worried that my troubles might stem from a blood clot, though I know absolutely nothing about blood clots except that they can kill and are especially deadly on airplanes for some reason.
I reached Phoenix alive, but the PVCs continued to grow in number and intensity. I fell asleep with them Sunday night and woke up with them early Monday morning. They stayed with me throughout the day, sometimes pounding my chest with such violence that they took my breath away or forced me to cough. My wife made a point of sticking close to me when she could and, when she couldn't, making sure I was never alone. Around four o'clock, I began feeling a squeezing sensation in the middle of my chest. I found a computer and looked up a Web site that listed the symptoms of a heart attack. The tightness in the chest was right at the top of the list:
- Uncomfortable pressure, fullness, squeezing or pain in the center of the chest lasting more than a few minutes.
- Pain spreading to the shoulders, neck or arms. The pain may be mild to intense. It may feel like pressure, tightness, burning, or heavy weight. It may be located in the chest, upper abdomen, neck, jaw, or inside the arms or shoulders.
- Chest discomfort with lightheadedness, fainting, sweating, nausea or shortness of breath.
- Anxiety, nervousness and/or cold, sweaty skin.
- Paleness or pallor.
- Increased or irregular heart rate.
- Feeling of impending doom.
I felt all of these symptoms to one degree or another, though even at the time I could attribute most of them to panic and imagination (pressure in my neck, nervousness, impending doom, etc.) or my natural state (paleness or pallor). But the tightness was unmistakably real, and it terrified me. Though the tightness was not painful—just very uncomfortable—the Web site stated that it is "vital to seek medical attention quickly if you feel the sort of pressing pain or heaviness described above. There is a 90 percent probability that pain of this type is angina. And even if it goes away, the artery blockages that caused it are still there and will grow progressively worse. Ignoring this sort of pain because it is not unbearable or because it goes away is the worst thing you can do. It is the only warning you are likely to get of a potentially lethal condition."
I made my fears known to the family as calmly as I could, and everyone agreed that I should get to the nearest emergency room as quickly as possible. So two grandparents, two parents, my wife, and I all piled into a five-passenger sedan and drove to what turned out to be one of the top ten heart hospitals in the country.
