Suspended

I have spent these past few days in the hospital on pause from everything and anything, including myself. I'm not quite sure how to reanimate.

I promise — absent some unfortunate and heretofore unknown development — that this is not about to become The Most Depressing Blog In Your Feed. I will return to your ordinary programming of potato-sack sweatshirts and funny pet stories ASAP. But this week has been one for the books, and since I kinda left you hanging what with the whole “Is Jordan still alive?” question, I figured I should probably bring you up to speed on how the remainder of my week went.

(Also, it has been my experience that knowing more about the strange things that our bodies can do to show us that they are in distress can be tremendously helpful when it comes to a) identifying said things and b) advocating for ourselves with regards to said things.)

What. A. Week.

On Wednesday (linked above), I spent the day in the emergency room with a splinteringly painful arm and a feverish body, and returned home with a pocketful of antibiotics, some pain meds, and a desire to sleep for 12 hours (which I did). My mom stayed over to help with the kids, and took them to school in the morning…allegedly.

I say “allegedly” because I don’t remember that morning. (Or, if I’m being honest, much of anything else from the past few days, save for what I’ve picked up from notes in my phone and texts with friends.) Sometime in the middle of the morning I woke up — if you can call “coming into consciousness in a deep pool of sweat” “waking up” — face-down and spread-eagled on my bed…and I had no idea where I was. Where my kids were. What day it was. What year it was. I stumbled into the bathroom on legs that didn’t work and threw up, over and over. I called my boyfriend and told him I didn’t know how we had met. I called my mom and asked her where she lived. I threw up again, this time knocking my chin on the seat so hard that my lip bled.

My boyfriend found me on the bathroom floor and had to help me get into my pants as I thought the words “Well, this is probably the last time he’ll ever get this close.” He drove me to the emergency room, where I went first to the ER, and then — I don’t remember many of these steps, but I think they included an MRI, EKG, blood tests, wheelchairs, and more than one shot of morphine for my screaming arm. Finally, I arrived at an inpatient bed in the cardiac unit, where I stayed until about noon this morning.

The doctor said that she thought something was going on with my heart. She said the word “infarction” — that I remember — and told me that they needed to push some dye through my heart.

The next thing I remember, I am in a hospital gown with my butt showing. There are three separate catheters in my right arm and six electrodes affixed to my chest, and my boyfriend is watching me carefully from an armchair in the corner. I don’t eat or drink for at least two days, while I wait on testing to be completed. I sleep (or at least a version of sleep) on damp sheets and awaken with them in a tangle on the floor.

I am certain about very little save for the fact that I am either very ill, or very crazy, or possibly both at the same time.

More things I remember from the last few days: The top-to-bottom exceptional staff, who were kind, responsive, intelligent, and empathetic, and who also did not let me walk on my own even when I insisted (repeatedly, and incorrectly) that I was fine. The nurse who explained to me that I should crumble graham crackers over the pudding cups for a truly exceptional snack (she was right). The orderly who didn’t get annoyed at me when I tangled my many wires around the entire tray table, upending it onto my sheets (again). The nurse who brought me extra pillows because he was worried that I’d re-injure my infected elbow on the side of the hospital bed (which I did, but not for lack of his trying).

I didn’t really sleep, ever…but I actually rested very well all night long, in spite of the constant alarms and needle pokes and the fact that my body could not seem to stop moving.

I think my mom came to visit at some point. I don’t really remember. Isn’t that strange?

By Saturday morning — this morning — I was more or less back to myself. I ate some oatmeal, and met with a doctor who explained that my test results — save for those initial enzyme abnormalities that preceded my admission — were normal, and didn’t suggest that I’d had a heart attack or was experiencing any kind of blockage. I was, in short, good to go.

So what. The fuck. Happened?

Her suggestion made both zero sense and all the sense in the world, if you happen to know me:

Basically, my brain did it.

Take a serious physical infection and a bad reaction to antibiotics and combine it with a few recent devastating events capping a fucking rollercoaster of a half-decade and there you go: Taken all together, it broke me, and created an actual somatic response that lowered my blood pressure to the point where I was left physically sick and wildly disoriented. It apparently also created a situation that elevated my cardiovascular enzymes to a dangerous point that required inpatient treatment (this is where she lost me, but I trust her). It seems that the enzymes went back to where they needed to be a couple of days later, and the rest of my symptoms have receded into the crevasses of partial amnesia, but…

Holy crap. That was really, really frightening. Not “being sick,” or “being in the hospital” — neither of those are fun, obviously, but I can handle both. Being totally out of control? That, I can’t handle. Needing my boyfriend to physically put on my pants in order to bring me to the hospital? No thank you. Needing to rely on other people to take care of my kids, without even really having the opportunity to ask (and thus profusely thank) them? Over my dead body. (Too soon?)

The fact that my bare ass was seen by many, many of the staff members of the Los Robles Cardiovascular Unit was, I’m sure, not especially exciting for them — but oh, it was the cherry on top for me.

Currently reading #topical

I don’t know how to summarize this experience neatly, apart to say that it was — or at least I sincerely hope it was — a game-changer. Not just so I “take better care of myself” going forward — although yes, that too, please — but rather so that I care about taking care of myself going forward.

So that I remember how much those I love worry about me, and want me to be well. So that I remember how much I want to be well for them.

I don’t think “being well” is a thing I’ve cared much about one way or another for quite some time. I’d like to try, at least, to start.