When Everything Changes

Michael’s mommy and daddy received a very loud wake-up call last Monday evening.

My wife had a heart attack.

It came out of the blue. She has no family history of heart disease, she doesn’t smoke, and we had what we believe to be fairly healthy eating habits.

But the Emergency Room physician made it crystal clear to me: she was in the middle of a true myocardial infarction.

This isn’t something we’d ever had to deal with before, nor anything we could have expected. We did have signs, but we didn’t know how to interpret them.

In the weeks that followed Thanksgiving, my wife had complained repeatedly of recurring and increasing pain in her back and her right arm. The pain seemed to center in her chest, but included her right arm, her neck, jaw and tongue. Right after Christmas she scheduled an appointment to see her doctor. I took her to the visit on Monday. One of the tests he ran was an EKG, and he was concerned about one of the readings. He arranged an appointment with a cardiologist for Wednesday. He didn’t say he thought there was immediate danger or that he knew for certain what might be the problem, except that he was disturbed by her “depressed ST wave”.

We went home with a couple of new prescriptions for her: Metoprolol and nitro glycerin. My worry immediately shot through the roof when I overheard her asking the doctor about them on the phone, saying “So if I’m having chest pain, I should take the nitro glycerin?”

That evening, after putting Michael to bed, her pain was beyond anything she’d ever known. She’d taken Advil and Tylenol, but they did no good. We weren’t sure what to do, because despite the pain, it wasn’t clear what was going on. There was no tingling in her left arm, no radiating, stabbing pain. The medicine stated what symptoms to look for in order to justify taking it, and she wasn’t having those symptoms.

Finally, the pain was more than she could bear.

So I called my eldest daughter and asked if she could stay with Michael while we were away. When she arrived, I drove my wife to the emergency room at the local hospital.

That’s when we got our confirmation. The attending physician pulled me aside and gave me the news, and showed me the EKG they ran clearly indicating what was going on.

“We gave her the meds to slow down her heart rate, so that the area of the heart starved by oxygen won’t need it as badly. But we need to get her into the cath lab immediately. I already have the cardiologists on the way.”

He spoke as clearly and as sympathetically as he could, and though I was comforted by his words, I felt a fog of disbelief and shock descend over me.

My wife cannot be having a heart attack. She just can’t. If anyone should, it should be me. I’ve got the family history of heart disease. I have the arrhythmia problems and high blood pressure. It should be me lying there.

I held her hand and walked along side the bed as she was whisked upstairs to the lab for an angiogram.

“This is where we part ways,” the nurse said. I didn’t want to part ways. I wanted to stay with her. But I knew she was in good hands.

They told me to wait in the lobby of the cardiac care unit. Probably wouldn’t take more than 45 minutes. They were going to run a catheter up through her femoral artery, snake it along into her heart, inject a dye and use their scanners to determine where the blood was flowing, and more importantly where it wasn’t.

As I stood in the waiting room, I prayed to God. I knew it was His decision, and that His will was best, no matter whether I liked the outcome or not.

In what was simultaneously no time at all and also the longest 45 minutes of my life, the cardiologist came out the doors, locked eyes with me, and gave me two thumbs up. I exhaled a vast sigh of relief as my legs turned to jelly.

“She did really well, and she’s going to the recovery room right now,” he said. He explained that she’d had a 99 percent blockage in the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, one of the arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle, and this was causing the pain. They inserted a stent, which opens and holds open the artery, effectively removing the blockage.

After a few more minutes I was allowed to go back to her room for a visit. She was awake, but very groggy. She showed me the picture they took during the angiogram, of the before and after. The difference was crystal clear: blockage in one, free flow in the other.

Of course, they wanted to keep her there at the hospital for observation. The theory being, if she’s going to show signs of a complication, it would be better for her to do it where they can act immediately.

So for the next four days, I spent my time shuttling back and forth between home and the hospital.

I have my daughters to thank for taking care of Michael while I visited my wife alone. I dragged them along with me so we could have dinner with her there in the hospital in the evenings. I brought her a tall “decaf” (wink wink) latte every morning. We shared the most memorable New Year’s Eve ever, toasting the arrival of 2009 there in her hospital room with sparkling pear juice and plastic champagne flutes.

I brought Michael a few times, and of course he wanted to make the bed go up and down, and turn on and off every light he could find. And he wanted to call the nurse over and over again. He didn’t grasp the fact that it might make her cranky. I offered to give him a good reason to have to stay in his own hospital bed.

My wife is home now, and she and I are completely in agreement that our lifestyle needs to change. We need to eat better, and we need to get exercise.

So now we’re on a different diet. We’re going to be bumping up the fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains and lean meats. Back off on the dairy, limit the sugar, caffeine and fat intake. We’ve picked up a couple of books on nutrition, and will be sculpting a new menu for our family for this year.

And we will be taking walks every night, starting slowly and working our way up to vigorous 30 minute walks. We have plans to go on weekend hikes when weather permits, play tennis or swimming.

Our life, as we knew it, is over. Thank God, we have been given a second chance to do right. We now know that heart attack signs aren’t always easily recognized. We now know that it can happen to us, and that how we treat our bodies has a very real effect on our health and long-term prospects.

One day, everything changed. And it’s for good.