My BrokenHearted Valentines Day

Monday, the day before Valentines, I had to work. A few hours before time to go I kept having a pain in my chest that felt like heartburn. Since I am "of a certain age" now I occasionally have heartburn so I searched the house for a rolaids or a tums. Finding none I left for work and stopped at a store along the way to buy some. As the night progressed the pain was getting worse not better so I left work and went to the Nelly Deli down the street to buy some zantag or something. I took that and the pain subsided a bit but not entirely. Before bed I took another one and slept fitfully for about five hours. When I woke up the pain was still there but now it was worse. I took another zantag but it didn't do anything and about four O'clock I started getting a little short of breath. I'm a gay boy so that instantly translates that I am a mommas boy so I called my momma and asked her what the symptoms might mean. Since I have had a cold and a racking cough she suggested that I may have bronchitis or it could be a gall bladder problem. I thought I should go to the emergency room and she agreed, having had a gall bladder attack herself a few years ago. I took a shower and shaved, thinking I would go to the emergency room, they would tell me what was wrong, give me medication and I would go to work.

I drove myself to the emergency room at Touro hospital about 6 and they weren't busy so I was taken back almost immediately (of course in a triage when you complain about chest pains that gets you a little more attention anyway.) By this time I was pretty anxious about the pain, which was now so bad I was having great difficulty drawing a full breath and was in the beginning stages of a panic attack. The nurse helped calm me down but my chest felt so compressed that I still couldn't breathe. They took me back to another room and gave me an EKG and then took me to a bed in the emergency room and had me strip to my underwear and put on one of those fun little backless gowns. A lab tech came immediately and took blood and wanted to start an IV on me. I sort of balked (I have a dislike of needles and especially IV's) so she agreed to hold off until they determined it was absolutely necessary. The doctor came back soon after and they started questioning me about the pain and told me that my EKG and my blood tests were both "a little off." The lab tech came back and put the IV in and now I was getting pretty nervous about what was happening. I have a strong family history of heart disease but for christs sake, I'm only 34 years old. My roommate Jeff showed up around then and the nurse came in and dropped a nitroglycerine pill under my tongue. I realized then that I was actually having a heart attack. The pain wasn't going away, it was getting worse and they gave me three nitro pills before deciding to put me on a nitro IV. They were already putting other meds in my IV so they ran a second one. A cardiologist and my regular doctors partner showed up along with two other nurses who began applying more EKG leads (they had taken the first ones, along with half my chest hair, off earlier.) I was getting really hot and uncomfortable and suddenly my blood pressure bottomed out. I was light headed, hot, trying to get away from all of them and they were trying to talk to me. The nitro was causing the blood pressure to drop so they took it away, laid me back and started another EKG to find out what was happening with my heart. It took about 10 minutes for my blood pressure to be totally stable and me to stop sweating and actually get some color back in my face.

The cardiologist came in and said they were going to do a heart catheterization as soon as the "team" could arrive. I had been through this process with both my grandfather and my father. My paternal grandfather died of a massive heart attack in 1998 and my maternal grandfather had a heart attack years ago. My father had a heart attack followed by quad bypass surgery in 1997 and then another one in November of last year. He has recovered from both. All of this is running through my mind as they are wheeling me down the hall with IV tubes and EKG wires going everywhere. They get me into the room and there is a big cart with six flat screen monitors and equipment everywhere. It took a while for them to get ready (one person was coming from Destrahan) and they were explaining the process to me as they went. Basically they take a thin tube through the artery in your groin (Read: to the left of your cock) and inject dye that allows them to see the arteries of your heart and what is happening there. Jeff was shown the video of the procedure after it was over and said that for a split second when they inject the dye you can see my entire heart beating. It's the first visual proof that I actually do have a heart. They gave me shots to numb the area but I was awake for the whole procedure and tried to watch as much as I could on the screens. None of it made much sense to me, especially after the morphine shot I had in the ER. They told me during the procedure that they were going to put a stent in one of my arteries. First they put a small balloon in there and blow it up to widen the artery and then put a metal mesh tube in there to hold it in place. The balloon is deflated and removed but the metal tube stays there. Then they withdraw the tube, plug her up and suture it shut.

The heart attack itself was very minor. The doctors explained to me that it was caused by a slight narrowing of an artery that had forced something (which wasn't explained entirely) into the bottom of my heart. It was a freak thing and was not caused by cholesterol or my family history or by drugs. Since I had the heart attack everyone has assumed I was full of drugs which I was not and had not been. I don't exactly resent the accusation but am tired of saying "No, I wasn't high." There was no permanent damage to my heart and I should recover completely.

All the hospitals in the area that are actually open are overwhelmed. I should have gone to an ICU but they were all full so I was taken to a post op recovery area where I could be closely monitored. It was about 1 am by this point and though I was groggy I was also incredibly hungry. They found me some jello and promised me some ice cream. My nurses were great. Karen, my main nurse that night told me she would give me some morphine and then find me ice cream. Her theory, she explained, was that the drugs would knock me out and she would be able to eat the ice cream. Smart girl. I slept immediately and didn't get the ice cream.

The next morning I had to call my mother and explain what had happened. Like all the phone calls I would have over the next couple of days it went like this:

"So Mom, you know I told you I was having chest pains...Well I had a heart attack."

"No you didn't, what really happened?"

"No, Mom, I had a heart attack."

"Quit lying, you are 34, you didn't have a heart attack."

"No, really, I had a heart attack and a heart catheterization"

"Oh my god, are you OK?"

"Yes, I am fine, now."

Needless to say my Mother began making immediate plans to travel to New Orleans but by the end of the day I had convinced her that I was going to be okay and she didn't need to come. It was one of those moments when a boy does need his mother but I was in very capable hands and she would have been there with nothing to do but worry. I talked to my sister and several friends on the phone during the day in between rounds of blood tests, EKG's, drugs and naps. It's all kind of a blur. My friend Michael came by that afternoon and brought me some magazine and the such. He was actually there during my transition to a regular room. Since I was attached to so much machinery I wasn't able to get up and go to the bathroom. Modest me, I asked him to step outside my curtained area so I could go the bathroom and then the nurses made him leave the ward. Poor thing was pushed around but eventually was able to come back in and stayed with me through my transistion and sat with me for quite a while till I was tired and ready to sleep again. Jeff was in and out between work and he was at home getting my room ready for me to come home. I think this consisted of picking up all the junk I had left lying around and washing my bedding so I had a nice comfy bed in which to recuperate.

The Post Op Recovery room was interesting. It was mostly older heart patients and a few odds and ends. There was a very large black woman who had been involved in a car crash and fractured several bones. When she got to the hospital they found out she was pregnant. I happened to be awake when they told her that and she started screaming (I swear I couldn't make this up) "Give me some WIC, Give me some WIC!" For those not familiar with the term, WIC stands for Women, Infants and Children. It's welfare. The physical therapy people came to start her therapy and she screamed at the top of her lungs and tried to hit them. The old woman next to me was nearly dead and eventually moved. She was replaced by a hacking old man. I was very glad to move to another room, I thought. My roommate was an old man named Mr. Jones. He was somewhere between 80 and death. Deaf as a post, full of pneumonia and about as cooperative as a rattlesnake. The nurses, respitory therapists, doctors and aids all came in about every 20 minutes to scream at him (MR JONES, ARE YOU READY TO TAKE YOUR MEDICINE? MR JONES, DO YOU NEED TO GO THE BATHROOM? MR JONES, I'M GOING TO GIVE YOU YOUR BREATHING TREATMENT NOW, OKAY? MR JONES, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, DO YOU KNOW WHAT CITY THIS IS?) BTW Mr. Jones never had to use the bathroom because he had always already gone.

My friends Joel and Penny came by the second night in there and sat with me for a bit. I slept a lot and asked Jeff to bring me some apples and bananas and vanilla wafers since the food I got was minimal and not good. The doctors told me I could go home Friday if all stayed normal. Everything did and I was released late Friday morning. Jeff came and picked me up and we went to the drugstore to get all my meds that I have to take now for a while. Just six pills so it's not that bad.



I have holes in both arms that still kind of hurt. Eventually I was stuck about 13 times. I slept in my own bed last night and slept over ten hours. It was good. I woke up to find both of my doggies lying on either side of me. I can go back to work late next week and will probably go insane by that time.

All's well that ends, well, well.