The Aftermath

81 days since my cardiac arrest.


Life is starting to get back to a normal pattern.  Kids are back to school.  I have started to go back to work.  But the last 81 days have taught me a lot, and has changed me in many ways.

The month of July is blurry.  I spent most of it on oxycodone.  From someone that has done chest compressions on many people, you don't really know what it feels like until you experience it.  My ribs didn't even break, for gosh sakes!  How do bones hurt that don't break?!?! No amount of my essential oils were breaking this pain, and I just keep remembering my friend Kim saying she had been in a roll-over car accident and only used wintergreen, peppermint & panaway during recovery... Dang it, I'm a wimp...

God blessed us with stable enough finances that my husband, Inoke, was able to stay home with me for the first 6 weeks of recovery.  I am so lucky that we had such an amazing year in 2016 to build our marriage so that 6 straight weeks of him was comforting instead of frustrating!  I will tell you more about that later, because I know you need to know about that as well!  Every marriage will benefit from that story!! But I digress... By week 5, I had started to encourage him to go back to work... but what he didn't share was that my Cardiologist had suggested that an adult be with me at all times until by follow up visit to the Electrophysiology Lab.  I am positive they kept this little bit of information from me on purpose, because I still don't believe I was a sick as everyone says I was....

During this 6 weeks, I could not drive and I was on a contraption called a LIFE VEST.  This little strappy vest has 3 different electrode pads the size of my hands that laying on my skin along the bottom of my ribs on the left, and 2 vertical pads between my shoulder blades.  It also had 4 round disk pads that continuously monitored by heart rhythm.  If it sensed that my heart was in a shockable rhythm, it was set to alarm me.  And let me just tell you... that is the scariest sound in the entire world to wake up to in the middle of the night!

Here is what it looked like... (Image compliments of ZOLL)

 So... it is a lot like a bra, without all the support. Considering it was the hottest month of the year, and I am one to NEVER wear a bra to bed.... yeah, it was bad... a constant little reminder that I almost died.  Additionally, that little black battery was way heavier than you would think!  It had a strap on it that would fit diagonal across my chest/shoulder... but eventually I just tightened it into something similar to a belt... highly fashionable... will be all the fashion rage this fall!

Emotionally, I was a mess.  I see now that I had three different stages of emotions, but at the time I was not about to psychoanalyze it.  It started with feeling drugged out and zoned out, I was either passed out from my pain meds or starring endlessly at the TV.  It was the strangest thing to have no attention span.  This was so against my baseline personality, but I didn't seem to care about that either.  I went where I was told to go and did what I needed to do, but otherwise was a zombie. No joy, no anger, no worrying about the future... just completely in the moment.

This was followed by extreme sadness. Crying uncontrollably at the drop of a hat.  And not pretty cry either... straight up sobbing for no reason.  I couldn't remember anything that happened, why in the world was I crying!  Poor Inoke didn't have any idea why I was so emotional and would keep asking if I was ok... but I never had an answer for him because I really didn't know if I was.  I think I went through an entire box of Kleenex in one week... and not the little one...

And now it is anger and intolerance.  It is like my frontal lobe is on holiday and no one is minding my filter.  I have worked so hard to manage my anger and vocabulary that this is one of the most frustrating parts of recovery.  The littlest things make me irreversibly angry, to the point that I actually threw a chair one evening.  (In my defense, it was only a folding chair, and it was more of a toss over and backwards, rather than above my head and through a window...)  Luckily, the kids didn't see it... but poor Inoke did.  And each of these anger spells would fizzle back into sobbing.  I am happy that the anger is more controllable now, but it is still there.... burning under the surface.  My filter is slowly coming back, and I am better able to refrain from telling off strangers, but my family is still getting the brunt of it.  Poor kids at least have their mom... and they are learning that adults make mistakes and the finer art of how to properly apologize.  So at least they are learning something from my poor behavior.

At first, the one place that brought me the most comfort during those zombie/crying stages was church.  I was so excited to go back to worship.  Most people don't understand this... I didn't either until last summer.  See, I was raised Lutheran, but last summer was introduced to a 'hands in the air, bass pumping, concert lights & video screens' kinda church... and it is defiantly our home now.  Even Inoke is engaged in going every week.  I never thought I would be excited to get back to services weekly, but it definitely was what I needed.  One of the songs in the first worship set was "I Am Healed" (by River Valley Worship).  It was almost like He had it all planned out or something!!  (Of course He did... this whole entire thing has been executed tremendously well) I even started back at my volunteering because it felt so good to be there, around such positive people  and giving back to the One that I knew saved me...

So there I was... in limbo until my next Cath Lab appointment on August 11th... just treading water.  Finding purpose at church, but in little else.  Until a certain job interview that I had forgotten about....

But that is for next time :)