Life on the cardiac floor
It’s rush, rush, rush. And then it’s not
Babe, maybe you’d better call an ambulance.” Two weeks prior I was eating breakfast with a buddy at a diner and I came this close to passing out. Field of vision narrowed, began to fall over. And it startled me so much I must have gotten an adrenaline burst and come back. I shakily got home and did what a lot of members of my gender do. I employed the cherished male health strategy of, “I’ll give it a couple days, maybe it’ll go away.” Yes, I’m an idiot.
Well, it never went away, but seemed to improve until the day of the ambulance. I hate to draw attention to myself, and we live on a culde-sac with just a few homes, so of course screaming onto our street, lights flashing, come two ambulances. Both sets of EMT’s come flying in, see me on the floor, figure I’m having a heart attack, and take two EKG’s.
“Hey, chief, you still with us? Your EKG doesn’t look too bad; which hospital you want to go to?” I pick the one close to where I grew up. They hustle me onto a gurney, whip me into the back of the ambulance, and we travel 25 minutes over a nice crop of Allegheny County potholes. The EMT in the back with me decides to start an IV, a fine idea. He tries several times to find a vein. “Sorry, chief, ain’t happenin’.”
I get zoomed into an emergency room and a doctor and five nurses/assistants/admissions staff hover over me. I’m answering questions, signing forms, getting blood pressure readings while standing, sitting, lying down and having a lot of blood drawn. “Excuse me, you have several puncture wounds in your arm. Didn’t they start an IV?” I tell him it’s a long story.
“We’re sending you for a CT scan of your head and chest X-rays. Take about 20 minutes. Your blood work should be back by then.” I think, “Good Lord, I must be dying. Blood work results in 20 minutes?”
I get back and the ER doctor and my primary care physician take down my history. They reach the same conclusion. “You’re medical [I’m a retired dentist] and you waited two weeks to get this looked at??!!”
They admit me to the cardiac floor. Three more personnel. The last guy brings in an echocardiogram machine. “Takes about 25 minutes and during that time we’ll twice inject some solution which we agitate first to make bubbles.”
“Uh, when I was in practice I tried to get the bubbles out of the syringe. Not make more.”
“These are small bubbles.”
That was Day One. Highlights were my wife, my son and his wife keeping me company and a phone call from my D.C.-based daughter. “I wish I were there, Dad.” And about the blandest meal of my life. Hearthealthy, no salt.
At 7 a.m. the next day I feel like I’m a driver in the pits of the Indy 500. Door opens, two docs and four staff sprint in, taking a bunch of tests and readings, firing results at each other, telling me what’s next. They throw me in a wheelchair, give me four new tires, top off the fuel, and zip me away for a before-and-after imaging sandwiched around a stress test. Always wondered what a dry shave of my chest would feel like. I no longer wonder.
Finally, the results. I did not have a heart attack. An arrhythmia I’ve had since childhood had flared up for the first time. It never had affected my activities in the slightest. I get my thyroid meds reduced, have to cut back on the caffeine and take Lopressor to stabilize my heart rhythm. I offer, “Yes, but Lopressor lowers blood pressure, and mine is already low.”
“You’re right. So you must also take sodium chloride tabs three times a day.”
Thus I become the only patient on the cardiac floor to be placed on a high-salt diet.
The charge nurse comes in, tells me she will pull all my chest leads and then I can get dressed and leave. “Thought I had to leave in a wheelchair.”
“Nope, we say, if you can walk, you can walk on out of here. Just let me pull that last le …”
And then a sobering reminder that this is the cardiac floor. She sprints away to the cry of, “Fifty-two! Fifty-Two! Call the code! Fifty-two!! Call the code!!”
I pull the last lead and get dressed mostly in silence. My wife and I are not rubberneckers. We feel it’s insensitive to the people involved. But there are six hospital personnel out in the hall, and no one is smiling. I assume the worst, but hope I am wrong. God be with you, Fifty-two.
I walk out to the car meditating on the fact that we all get one circle of life. Just the one. And whether we’re drawing a large circle or a small one, when those ends meet we can only hope to be surrounded by our loved ones to see us off.
John Donne’s immortal words apply to us all, “Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”