My heart attack story, Part 6 - the aftermath

 Since the last post, I have been to a follow up visit with the cardiologist. She answered all of my technical questions and even made sketches to explain things better. The important news is that she cleared me to go back to work and to lift whatever I need to lift as long as I promised to pay attention to whatever signals my body tries to send to me.

Then I went to the cardiac rehab intake meeting, where they grilled me about every aspect of my life for a couple of hours, wired me up to monitors, took blood pressure several times, and had me walk laps around the various gym-like rooms there for a certain amount of time to see how many laps I could do and what sort of reaction my vital signs had to walking.

Here's the funny part: I did this timed walking on two broken toes! A day prior to the rehab intake, I woke up in the wee hours to pee and Jinx the cat was all curled up between my legs and the edge of the bed. Jinx's story is a long complicated one, but I'll just say that the little guy was happily purring in his sleep and I didn't want to disturb him.

Therefore, I rolled the blankets in a different direction and climbed as wide as I could over the stupid cat....and missed the edge of the bed. I went crashing down onto the floor, slicing up my left arm as I smashed through the wicker trash basket, giving myself a big welt on my ass as I slammed into the heavy iron of the antique bed frame, twisting my left foot and left leg in directions they are not designed to be twisted into, and knocking the wind out of me.

My poor wife was awakened by me crashing out of the bed, and since I had the wind knocked out of me and couldn't immediately reply when she screamed "ARE YOU OK!?!?!", she assumed I was having another heart attack and fell out of bed as I thrashed around dying. A few seconds later I caught my breath, blurted out some obscenities, and started laughing at how ridiculous the scene was.

I got to my feet then limped my way to the bathroom. Meanwhile, the cat yawned, stretched, and followed me to the bathroom in case something interesting was going to happen there. That means I broke two toes, wrenched my knee, and pulled a thigh muscle for nothing because the cat would have woken up anyway. Next time I'm just going to shove him out of the way and get up.

Rehab is both really interesting and really boring. I've never been a gym person. I'd rather climb the mountain or stack firewood. Three days a week, I go in there, change to indoor shoes, they wire me up with a telemetry monitor that tracks my heart's electrical impulses, and check blood oxygen & blood pressure. First I go into the room where the treadmills are and they play 1960's & early 70's music. On Friday they played ABBA...yes, I said ABBA. Where did they find an ABBA CD? And WHY did they find an ABBA CD? Today they were playing Creedence Clearwater Revival. That at least makes sense.

In the 60's/70's music room I walk on a treadmill with looking out the window to entertain myself. The therapist keeps showing up to take BP readings. Everything is doing what it is supposed to.

Then after a certain amount of time, I go to the 80's music room where there are assorted contraptions like recumbent exercise bikes and things that I guess are supposed to simulate walking up and down hills, but you do it from a seated position. Lacking a window there, it is especially boring.

Then when that phase is done, more BP checks and I get to peel off the sensors that the therapist has stuck all over me, ripping out hair each time. My guess is that by the time I am a couple of weeks into this, there will be bald spots for them to stick and thus suck to remove a little less.

When I got home from my hospital stay, stuff was basically where I left it when I made the decision to go get the weird pains checked out. The big chainsaw was still sitting on the floor of the shop by the door. There was a ladder leaning against the reloading bench. There were cases of ammo where they had been plopped in random in-the-way places as they had been delivered prior to the fateful day, waiting for me to have a chance to put them away where they belong. That chance never came because for several weeks after returning from the hospital, I was not allowed to pick up anything heavier than a gallon of milk.

I had instructions to walk 3 times a day for 10 minutes each time. What I'd do is leave the shop, turn right, and walk for 5 minutes then turn around and come back. Sammy the dog followed me at my heel, herding me because her humans are not supposed to wander off down the road. Those little walks were tiring. While the plumbing to the heart muscle had been repaired and no permanent damage was done to the muscle itself somehow, it had still been beaten up pretty good and wasn't running at full capacity yet.

After being home for 2 days, I came down to the shop and fired up my computer. There were 3079 emails in my inbox. I had been away from my desk for just 10 days.

Thankfully, a lot of it was endless "Black Friday" sale emails that I could "sweep" out of my inbox. Of course there were a dozen or more dumb "are these real guns?" emails because people refuse to read info that is written for them on the webpage.

In the midst of it all was a series of frantic emails from a jackass in Florida who was demanding order status info. The guy had also tracked down my home phone number and left a series of voicemails for my wife to have to deal with. I sent him an email telling him to NOT call my wife at home and how to check on order status, that I had just returned from the hospital and would update the work list ASAP. He replied that it was no way to run a business and wanted to cancel his order.

I canceled his order and refunded him per the contract. Honestly, if the guy is a jackass, I don't want his business anyway. A couple of days after his refund was processed, the guy, Robert Jacob of Palm Harbor, FL, who dresses up and plays pirate but took his fantasy a little too far and became an actual thief, used credit card fraud to steal an additional $990 out of my bank account. $990 is $10 shy of my being able to press felony charges against him. Yeah, after filling out reports and doing a bunch of paperwork I was able to get my money back, but the point is that in a time that I was supposed to be convalescing from a serious medical incident, I had to spend hours defending myself against a thief.

Also in that mix of emails was a couple of crazy screeds by a nutjob we call "crazy ice fisherman guy". He sends me these crazy, hate filled rants but doesn't sign his name to them. The email does not appear in our database, so it is unclear if he is an actual disgruntled customer or just a crazy stalker. The reason we call him crazy ice fisherman guy is because his email address is some numbers and the word "icefisherman". He goes on and on about lawyers, drops names of people who actually are customers, and talks a lot about him sitting around camp as a broken man. It really seems like schizophrenia. I've got at least a dozen emails from the guy.

The cardiac rehab people asked me about stress in my life. I should just show them my inbox some time.

So after being home for two weeks but not allowed to actually do anything, a follow up visit with a doctor (not a cardiologist) resulted in my getting permission to carry TWO woodstove logs at a time instead of one. (we heat with two antique wood stoves) That seemed like a big victory at the time.

One interesting thing that is different since I came home is that instead of watching nothing but documentaries on TV over meals, I've been watching fiction. Sure, it tends to be historical fiction, but it is still a different thing from documentaries. I have not yet begun to explore the psychology of that one.

My diet hasn't really changed because I eat mostly whole foods anyway. The cardiologist approves of what I eat, so that is one less thing to be turned topsy-turvy by the whole thing.

One last thing...in the first installment of this story, I mentioned that as I drove to the hospital, I had some little thing telling me to look around at the world as it was a very real possibility that it was my last look at it. One of the things I saw was some Christmas reindeer set up by the bandstand on the common in Claremont, NH about a mile from the hospital. It was a family of three of them, a buck, a doe and a fawn. The buck had fallen over and was laying on his side in the grass. It made me sad.

I didn't see it the symbolism at the time because I was busy trying to not die, but that silly, tacky reindeer represented my family. The buck was down, leaving the doe and fawn behind.

On a trip to a follow up appointment, I pulled the car over by the common and stood him back up, then reattached his antlers that had broken off in his fall. Now the family of reindeer is whole again. He is back on his feet and so am I.

My heart attack story, Part 5 - going home

Leaving the hospital was a weird thing.

First I almost died had I not been flown to the specialist ER via helicopter at 150+mph. Just one week prior!

For that week, at any given time, there was a team of 8-10 people assigned to watch over me and observe everything. I was wired to monitoring equipment. They dutifully measured my urine output and fluid intake. They would wake me up at 5AM to weigh me. It was a pretty high level of concern and care.

Then, on Friday evening, you get your discharge packet, take you down to the lobby in a wheelchair, and send you on your way with a fistful of prescriptions to be filled.

I will not lie, it was a bit scary to be going home. We are on a dirt road off of another dirt road, partway up a mountain. The cardiac care unit with all of it's monitoring devices and specialist staff is 40 miles away.

We are pretty much on our own here. Usually that whole rugged individualism thing is something to be proud of, but a near-fatal heart attack followed by a week in a specialist hospital unit introduces the idea that sometimes outside help is a good thing.

The prescriptions were sent to a pharmacy down the road from the hospital because our normal pharmacy (about 15 miles from home) would have been closed by the time we got there. My wife drove us to the place and the stuff wasn't ready yet, it would be maybe 1/2 hour. So we went next door to the food co-op store to get my daughter as snack and kill some time...maybe pick up something for dinner since we had been eating hospital food all week.

We wandered around the store slowly. It was the first time I had worn anything other than a hospital johnny or those ridiculous rubber-nubbed hospital socks for a week. It was both comforting and foreign to be in my own clothes and my own shoes again.

Still, I was kind of in a fog. I was probably still feeling residual effects of the opiates, but at the same time the whole thing may have just been overwhelming. At some point I had to pee, so I located the men's room and shuffled my way there.

It was liberating to NOT have to wrangle an IV pole, half a dozen wires, two IV lines and carry the vital signs telemetry device with me just to take a leak. After a week of that, it almost felt like a body part was missing.

Then I went to the sink to wash my hands & saw myself in the mirror. Damn, I looked tired. I still had flakes of rust in my hair from working on the van when this all started. Then when I went to wash my hands, I looked down at them and saw the dried blood, the dozens of needle marks, the bandages from where IVs were taken out an hour previously and the big wad of bandage with a special clear bandaid kinda thing over it where the incision had been for the procedure and it was all a bit overwhelming.

There are a million emotions to process here, but a grocery store bathroom is not the place to do it, so I choked them down, washed my hands and shuffled my way back to my girls.

When we got home, my dog Sammy, who I had told to keep an eye on things when I left to make my run to the ER, was overjoyed to see me. She was leaping in the air and running circles around us. The cat was happy to see me. The chickens knew something weird was going on, but just kinda rolled with it, but the ducks were pretty happy to see me too.

We turned on the oil furnace to heat the house for the first few days. We heat with wood, using two antique stoves, but I wasn't up for lighting fires and wasn't supposed to use my right arm for a week, which meant no playing around with firewood. The concern was that if the incision into the wrist artery cracked open, I'd bleed out but quick.

Generally, I ignore most doctor's orders unless I agree that they make sense, but this time around I'm listening to every word. I usually set my own broken bones and have even pulled one of my own teeth with pliers when I broke one, but this time I'm doing what I'm told.

After the first week, I wasn't supposed to pick up anything heavier than a gallon of milk. Then a follow up doctor visit gave me permission to carry TWO pieces of firewood.

At the time I am writing this, I have to go back to the hospital for a cardiac doctor follow-up visit, then on Thursday am going to the cardiac rehab place at the hospital in the next town for stress testing and intake into their rehab program. It calls for sessions three times a week for 12 weeks, up to 24 weeks if the doctor thinks it is warranted.

I will conclude this tale in the next post.

My heart attack story, Part 4 - the procedure

 Because of where the coronary artery blockages were located, the odds of being able to replumb around them and the risks involved in open-heart surgery, the cardiac surgeon decided that even though the original plan was to pillage some veins from my leg and a spare artery in my chest to run new arteries around the 6 blocked arteries that feed my heart muscle, the potential outcome wasn't worth the risk.

Instead, the team chose to install a series of stents.

Stents are little non-ferrous wire woven things that look like the "Chinese finger cuffs" things that you used to win at the games at carnivals. They are inserted into the blocked area in a flattened state with a tiny balloon in the middle after burning away the blocked part with a laser. Once in place, the balloon is inflated to jam the stent into place and it will then hold open the previously blocked area.

This is some real space-age level science. It is essentially like relining a worn out rifle barrel or installing sleeves in the cylinder of an engine. The big difference is that in this case, the engine (the heart) is running during the process and the machine tools & replacement parts are installed via a brake line.

One of the blockages were in such a location where there was no realistic way of opening it up and stenting it without potentially causing problems. Stuff like this is all about calculated risk. That one feeds a y-shaped little branch circuits and it was left 90% blocked. I was told that the body would compensate for the blockage by developing "collaterals", which are new blood vessels that develop out of tiny, somewhat dormant ones when other vessels are not working right. I had no idea that the body could do this.

Another small branch circuit was blocked off by one of the stents, but again, it was calculated risk. Opening up one of the three main arteries that feeds the heart was deemed more important to life than the branch circuit, and it is assumed it will be replaced by collaterals.

This time around, there was more discomfort than the emergency procedure that I underwent upon my arrival at the hospital. Perhaps because when I got there I was literally dying of a heart attack and the discomfort of the catheterization paled in comparison to the chest pain from the heart attack. Maybe there was just more time to think about it the second trip to the cath lab.

The staff was awesome. They were great to talk to and worked together like a machine. The guy leading the show is a professor who teaches this stuff at Dartmouth medical school and co-authored three books on the procedure. He is a former Marine.

You are wide awake for this, so I was in constant communication with the team. They want to know how you are feeling, whether you are hot, cold, etc so feedback is very important because things can happen fast.

At one moment, the nurse asked if I was hot or cold, I told her cold, then what seemed like seconds later I was hot and felt like I was about to break out in a sweat, the Dr asked if I was feeling hot, the nurse noted my coloration and someone else whom I could not identify said "He's crashing, BP is 54", the Dr, in the middle of conversation with the other Dr who was feeding the gadgetry to my heart via my wrist artery, through out some change to whatever medication I was on and it was instantly adjusted.

What I felt was a weird feeling because there is a foreign object shoved through my arm plumbing, then a lot of pressure across my chest. While I COULD feel some weird stuff going on in the heart area, there must not be many nerve endings there because I couldn't really pinpoint it to describe it.

Now an then, you'd hear "EEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeee...SNAP" which I understand was something to do with the laser or perhaps the inflation of the tiny balloons that installed the stents. I'll have to go back and read the case notes.

I was on the table for about an hour and they installed 12cm of stents in total, which seems like quite a bit of relining of the arteries.

Tis procedure is performed 4 to 6 times per day by this team. There are a whole lot of blocked arteries out there!

Everyone on the team I spoke to about causation said the same thing: genetics.

I'm about 20lb overweight, do physical labor with no issues or shortness of breath, generally throw myself around like a 20 year old, climb ladders, split logs, lift heavy weights etc. For the most part, I live on whole foods and avoid processed foods with things you can't pronounce in the ingredients. I don't drink. I don't smoke. This whole thing came as a complete surprise to me. My LDL cholesterol is just a hair over "ideal". It was all fine...until it wasn't.

After the procedure, I was wheeled to a recovery area where my fentanyl drugged self got to converse with a different group of staffers who were hopefully entertained by me but I can only vaguely remember them. After checking on the tourniquet at my wrist a few times every 5 minutes, they wheeled me back to my room.

Then began the ritual of slowly bleeding the air out of the tourniquet over the course of 4 (maybe 6?) hours. They kept on checking my vitals, and 24 hours later they let me go home.

Unfortunately, there was a shift change and for my going-home day, most of the nursing staff were new faces so I didn't get to say goodbye and thank you to the folks who had been taking top-notch care of me all week.

I will continue this tale in the next post.

My heart attack story Part 3 - I land at the medical center

 So after the chopper landed (see parts 1 & 2) they didn't waste any time at all pulling me out of the chopper, popping the lags with wheels on them out, and rushing me into the building at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Keep in mind that I was wrapped in a big blanket, with my hands crossed at my waist and strapped down with only my face peeking out. All I could see was various types of hospital corridor ceiling rushing by, punctuated by lefts and rights and going through doorways. It was like a movie.

Next thing you know, I'm in the catheterization lab, they unstrap me from the gurney, slide me off of it onto a long narrow metal table and a whole new crew of people are talking to me. The chopper crew grabs their gurney, straps and blanket and gets out of there. The doctor who seems to be in charge of what is now playing out talks to me, he seems like someone I'd want to hang out with.

I am told to grab a thing like a shovel handle with my right hand and not let go. It can be rotated on a couple of axis points to adjust the angle that your hand is at, and they go to work. I'm a bit loopy at this point, just sorta floating. Maybe it was the drugs they gave me, maybe it was something physiological because the bloodflow to a major part of my heart had stopped at that point.

In any event, I wasn't feeling stressed, it was all just interesting. I felt the cut at my wrist where they entered my artery system with the catheter equipment (I didn't ask what the gadgetry is called, but I asked plenty of questions, they seemed to find me entertaining LOL).

I could feel the device moving through my body, up my right arm, around the corner, and across my chest. There wasn't really any discomfort from it, maybe from the meds or maybe because the chest pain itself from my heart muscle fighting for it's life was worse than the gadget being fed through my arteries.

There is an xray machine moving around, getting several angles of live video of what is going on inside my heart. I figure out that if I roll my head to the left, I can watch the progress on a huge monitor. It was surreal to see contrast dye being injected into my own heart arteries, watch it flow, then abruptly stop at the blockages. There were six in all. The least restricted one was 70% blocked, the worst was completely blocked.

I am pretty sure that they opened up the totally blocked one and maybe used the catheter to shove past some of the others and force them open, but I am not sure. I will ask the cardiologist about this, or maybe the guy who actually did the procedure. He was cool and I'm sure he'd be happy to explain exactly what they did.

The chest pain stopped. I was wheeled from there to the cardiac wing which is a state of the art facility just a couple of years old. That would be my home for the next week while they tried to determine what to do next.

I was covered in wiring, had IVs in, and had an inflatable tourniquet on my right wrist to keep pressure on where they had cut into my artery. Every hour or so a nurse would come in with a syringe and bleed some air out of it & watch to be sure I didn't bleed.

I met the nurses and some doctors in the team, then laid there resting. At some point, my wife and daughter arrived. Being still under the effects of the fentanyl they gave me during the procedure, I am told I said some weird stuff LOL...but what else is new?

Over the next week, I had EKGs, CAT scans, endless blood tests, xrays, and all sorts of testing. At one point there were two different teams of people working on either end of me with portable ultrasound machines, one was inspecting my carotid arteries and the other was checking out the veins in my legs to see which ones they would want to pillage to repurpose as cardiac arteries because at the time they were planning to do open heart bypass surgery which would involve taking power tools to my sternum and a very long recovery time during which I'd be very, very fragile.

After all of this testing, the surgeon decided that the because of exactly where the blockages were, the risks involved in the bypass procedure outweighed the chances of success, so the decision was made to send me back to the cath lab for a series of stents to be installed that would fix MOST but not all of the blockages.

After being there a few days, I started to notice that there were a whole bunch of sensor pads stuck to me that weren't being used for anything, so I asked the nurse if I could take them off. Everyone who had dealt with me on that first frantic day had stuck things to me...the 1st ER, the chopper crew, the cath lab people, other people who tested me etc.

Most of them came off easily, just ripping some hair out. A couple left bruises. Then I realized that there were two good sized patches stuck to my back and side, those were the defibrillator pads the chopper crew had stuck to me in case I flatlined in flight. They were adhered really well. One took out a whole lot of hair when it came off, the other took hair AND the top layer of skin in an area the size of a silver dollar.

The next phase of this adventure involves the stent procedure, where they used lasers, balloons and little wire supports to reline my arteries. That will be continued in the next post.

My heart attack story, Part 2 - The Emergency Room & the helicopter

 The last post left off with me walking from the walk-in center to the emergency room as I was having a heart attack.

So I walked across the parking lot, through a little alleyway along some chain link fence around remodeling work being done on a building the the parking lot of the hospital, and around the corner to the ER.

When I walked in, they started to ask how they could help me (which in retrospect makes me wonder if the walk-in center people had called them to let them know a guy having chest pains was on the way, it doesn't seem like it in 20/20 hindsight) and I just blurted out that I was having chest pains. It was a very different response here than at the walk-in center. People started scrambling.

Suddenly I was in a wheelchair being rolled through the ER to a stall down at the end. Actually being AT the ER made the building sense of panic subside, so I thought that maybe this was all just stupid after all and is maybe gas. A doctor showed up and started asking questions about the pain and other symptoms. Since there were no other symptoms and the pain kinda moved around a lot as opposed to being centered in the upper left chest, he was thinking that maybe it wasn't a cardiac event, but let's get me hooked up to some monitoring equipment to be sure and maybe find out what is going on.

I started to feel a little embarrassed but just rolled with it, hoping that I had done something stupid like pop a rib out of it's socket while swinging a hammer under the van and that this whole thing wasn't just a trapped bubble of fart.

As the doctor left the stall, the nurse who had wheeled me in took over. She was nice, she was calm. I got the feeling that even if this was all just a trapped fart and let it rip, she wouldn't even roll her eyes about it.

They had me take my shirt off and lay back on a table to attach EKG pads to me in various places. There was a younger GenZ looking girl there who seemed like a trainee or maybe a med student who was given the task of doing this while the nurse did something off to my right side, I think she was getting me set up with a blanket ad pillow. Where she was working, she didn't have a clear view of the monitor because the overhead light reflected off the screen. This is important to the story.

I guess I need to point out that I am only slightly less furry than a wookie, so EKG pads aren't just going to stick. It took a while for the trainee to figure this out. Then she fumbled for a while with bandage scissors to trim chunks of chest hair away to sorta get the pads to stick. She was not particularly good at this task but eventually got them on and hooked the wires up.

Once fully connected, the nurse moved from where she had been standing to down near my legs so she could get a better look at the monitor now that I was all wired in. She went from casually looking up at the screen to standing straight upright and blurted out "OH SHIT!" and ran out of the stall to get the doctor.

When the medical professional who is overseeing your well being in the ER yells "OH SHIT!", that is a good indicator that things have gone pretty sideways.

Now everyone became quite animated. Except me, of course, because all I had to do was lay there and watch the drama unfold. The doctor came in and told me that I was having a heart attack, that it was "really bad", and that they were flying me to the major hospital 25 miles to the north where they have a state of the art cardiac wing, then went out of the stall in a hurry.

More people were suddenly sticking more sensors to me, someone took my shoes and socks off and put them in a bag with my shirt and jacket. The thought flashed through my head of the night my grandfather was killed in a house fire and the doctor brought out a plastic bag with his rings, keys, and wallet in it to give me.

Someone broke out a cordless hair trimmer to make clean spots for more sensors, the battery died so they went to scissors and disposable razors. The fact that my body hair killed the battery on the ER's hair trimmer is something that I'll laugh about for the rest of my life.

I turned to the nurse and said "I should probably call my wife and tell her what is going on, huh?" She replied "YES! Call your wife!" At the time, my wife and youngest daughter were house & dog sitting for a friend a town or two away.

I spoke to her on the phone, she seemed fairly calm and they headed to the hospital, arriving shortly before the chopper got there.

Throughout this, I never really felt fear. To this day I find that fascinating. There was some near-panic that was more of uncertainty knowing that if I screw something up like taking a wrong turn on the way to the hospital, it could have dire consequences, but the idea of actually dying, the reality that these could be my last moments on Earth, did not give me any fear or worry. My job here in this moment was done: I had gotten to the ER, called Wendy and what happens next is up to God, the skills of doctors, and technology...all out of my hands. I was ready for whatever came next and I was cool with whatever it was going to be.

The chopper crew came in, all dressed in thick insulated black flight suits. They were a bit worn looking and seemed a little dirty. This gave me the feeling that these folks don't screw around and jump into the fray to get the job done. They added their own stick on sensors and defibrillation pads and theirs stuck better. In fact, when I found the defib pads still stuck to me a few days later and pulled them off, one of them took a silver dollar sized chunk of skin with it.

They slid me onto their stretcher, had me cross my hands at my waist and wrapped me in a thick, solid black blanket before strapping me down with just my face showing. It occurred to me that the blanket was kind of like a shroud. They wheeled me out into the dark night and stopped for a moment for my wife and daughter to give me a goodbye kiss before shoving me into the back of the chopper.

The crew scrambled in. I was disappointed that none of them were door gunners. They fired up the engine and started the preflight takeoff routine. The crew members sitting at my head and to my left hooked up my wires to their equipment and put on helmets. I asked the one to my left "Hey, don't I get a helmet?' but she didn't hear me because chopper engines are pretty loud. Made a mental note to myself that if I was ever going to be life-flighted again to bring my own flight helmet (of course I have one from the early Cold War era).

The machine shuddered as the engine speed increased, then it lifted off the ground and tilted forward to begin it's 150+ MPH trip to the hospital in the next county 25 miles away.

There were no speakers blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" like in the battle scene in Apocalypse Now, so I just chuckled to myself as it played in my head. If chances were good that I wouldn't live to see the thing land, I may as well entertain myself.

This was not my first time in a helicopter, given the circumstances, it was certainly the most exciting.

The medical center operates four of the medivac choppers in various parts of the state. They cost $5 million each and have saved countless lives.

The hospital staff told my wife that if they had transported me by regular ground ambulance, I wouldn't have made it. This was a close call.

As luck would have it, a friend of a friend happened to be visiting his Mom in the first hospital and when he was leaving, stopped to get some video of the helicopter that the crew had just shoved someone into the back of. After discussing the time at which the video was shot, my buddy figured out it was me they had just loaded into the chopped on a stretcher so there is actually video of the lifesaving machine starting up and taking off.

It's just under 3 minutes long. I uploaded it to youtube and you can see it here.

(continued in Part 3)

My heart attack story, Part 1 - the chest pain

 It's been a busy year. I have been working seven days a week since the early spring, usually from 10AM until well after midnight, generally getting to bed around 2-3AM then doing it all over again the next day.

Since the spring, I think I have had maybe three "days off" which usually had to do with some family commitment. This all adds up to me being very much behind on all of my own personal projects and tasks. Tasks like hauling stuff to the dump, but first putting the muffler back on the old Ford van because it fell off when an exhaust bracket rusted through.

The van has an agriculture plate on it, which exempts it from being respectable in every way and roadworthy in most ways. Under the law, it needs a white light in the front, a red light in the back, a brake system, an exhaust (which is vaguely worded in the law on purpose) and a steering wheel. The fact that the law says it must have a steering wheel intrigues me and you know it was added to the law because someone like me was driving a shitbox truck with just a pair of vise grips and some lawmaker decided to add "steering wheel" to the requirements.

So anyway, there I was laying under the van, driving the muffler back onto the intermediate pipe with a little sledge hammer and all of a sudden I got a weird pain at my lower right rib cage. Damn, I thought...must have moved the wrong way and cracked a floating rib...and kept working because that's what I do.

I got the muffler back on, cranked down the clamp as much as my impact wrench would squish it, and jury-rigged some hangers to hold the tailpipe in place. Done. Still had the pain though, and it had moved to my right shoulder blade.

Then I loaded up the van and made a couple of dump runs, as all of the trash barrels were full. Still hurting.

Then my next plan was to head out to the range with the big chain saw and start dropping some trees that need to be cleared in order to start working on the new museum building out there. Couldn't shake the pain though. Tried stretching, laying flat on the floor, cracking things, nothing seemed to change it.

Maybe it was a weird gas bubble? Nope. Couldn't get it to move.

It occurred to me that maybe it was something important that a doctor should check out. There were no other symptoms. No nausea, no lightheadedness, no tingling or numbness anywhere, no shortness of breath, none of the classic heart attack symptoms.

Am I just being silly? Won't I feel like an idiot if I get to the walk-in center and this turns out to be a big 'ol fart stuck in the horizontal part of my colon? It's a weird pain though, so maybe I should just swallow my pride and go.

So I did.

I went out to the van, dressed in the my grubby "work on the van and go to the dump" clothes, complete with rust flakes from the van in my hair. I was a bit concerned & distracted by then. Didn't even change my shoes from my indoor shoes to my outdoor shoes and didn't even stick a pistol in my belt (I never leave the house unarmed, it's a way of life). I told Sammy the dog that she is a good girl and to keep an eye on the chickens, and left.

As I drove, the pain seemed to spread and intensify. I knew on a certain level that this could be a pretty bad thing.

The closest urgent care facility that is open on a Saturday afternoon is 15 miles away so that is where I headed.

On the way, it occurred to me that this is quite possibly a heart attack despite the lack of symptoms beyond the weird chest pain and I wondered if this scenery I was seeing as I drove was my last look at the world, so I committed as much of it to memory as I could.

One of the things that I saw as I drove through Claremont, the city to the north of here where the hospital is located, was their little Christmas display on the town common. There were three white wire reindeer statues, a buck a doe and a fawn. The buck had fallen over and was laying on the ground. This made me pretty sad.

I wondered if my wife would be able to figure out all of the paperwork I would be leaving behind and if she would know what stuff from my gun collection, book collection etc would be the stuff to sell to make mortgage payments to get her through until she could figure out how to make ends meet with the family bread-earner gone. I wondered if she could safely figure out how to drive the tractor to plow the driveway when it snowed. There wasn't anything I could do about those things because I had a full plate just staying alive long enough to reach the hospital.

A sense of urgency set in and it seemed like traffic wasn't taking this moment seriously and moving fast enough. I got stuck behind a little orange and silver car at a red light. Two thoughts went through my mind rapidly.

One was that in the movies, when someone has a heart attack, they clutch their chest then keel over and die. I didn't want that to happen while I was at the wheel of a 10,000GVW bigassed shitbox van that would no doubt go careening across 4 lanes of traffic and kill bystanders, so I kept my right hand on the shifter in case I DID feel the big squeeze so I could throw it in park.

The other thought was that maybe I should just turn to the left and drive over the median to go around the stopped traffic since there was no traffic going the other way. Right when I decided it was probably the best course of action, the light turned green and I was on the way to the hospital and theoretical safety again. At that point, I was still maybe a half mile to a mile away. It was starting to seem pretty desperate.

A couple of minutes later I pulled in and parked at the walk-in center. I had the presence of mind to lock the van as I left it in a parking space and went in. The lady asked how they could help me and if I had been there before. I told her I was having chest pains. She said that they didn't handle that stuff there, but I COULD DRIVE TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM, IT IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER.

Yes, the lady told the guy who was having a heart attack to DRIVE himself around the block to the ER.

I chose not to drive, I knew where the new ER entrance was and figured I could walk there faster than screwing around and finding a new parking spot. So I did.

That story will be continued in the next post because this one is already too long.

(spoiler alert: I lived!)