Tomorrow, February 4, is National Wear Red Day, an observance aimed to raise awareness about heart disease, the number one killer of American women. NUMBER ONE, PEOPLE.
Tomorrow you can show your support for women's health by wearing a piece of red clothing, a red ribbon, or another red item. If, by chance, your company has just handed over a bucket of cash to be a supporter of the American Heart Association, even better. Not ony do you get less money in your annual bonus pool, you get to wear a little magnetic pin that looks like a red dress. It's actually kind of cute, and I'm offering the men in my department 50 cents if I catch them wearing the red dress, but I'm just thinking a magnet shouldn't be near a pacemaker, right?? Oy vey.
No, I do not have a pacemaker. I got lucky. On Valentines Day, 2002 I was eating dinner with Mr. Carly and I swallowed sort of funny, and my heart sort of flipped, and it suddenly felt like there was a person inside my chest, trying to bang his fist through my ribs to get out. My pulse shot up and I felt like crap.
For the next few hours I could not get comfortable, nor could I get my pulse to slow down. I was hyperventilating but I just thought "I'll just lie down, I'll be fine." When Mr. C convinced me that we needed to go to the ER, about 2 am, I started to cry, then I went into the bathroom to wash my face with cool water to pull myself together. It stopped. My pulse returned to normal. Now THAT was freaky, so we decided to go to the ER anyway.
Of course, since the episode was over, they couldn't tell me anything, but I did get a referral to a cardiologist.
Diagnosis: paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia. Basically, your pulse is messed up and it's because something goofy is happening up in the top part of your heart. If there were actually wires in your heart sending signals to beat, mine would have some that were shorting out and arc-ing back.
I had to wear this oh-so-sexy thing called a Holter monitor, for 24 hours. Imagine this, take all 8 of the leads for a deluxe EKG, and wear them, attached to what looks like an 8 track tape player that you're carrying in a fanny pack. Someone made fun of me at work thinking it was a walkman. Uh, nope. But thanks for playing. In order to get the leads to stay on for 24 hours, they first scrubbed my skin with little bits of sandpaper and alcohol. Oh. My. Golly. Ouch!
The Holter test showed absolutely nothing, which was no surprise to me because I knew it didn't happen while I was wearing the monitor. (Mr. C wanted to canoodle just to see what THAT looked like on the monitor but that was just, well, NOT FUNNY dammit!!)
The cardiologists said that it seemed to be something non life threatening, called AV Node re-entry. I needed to go on Beta blockers. I will freely admit to being a wuss here, but beta blockers just sapped the life right out of me. I literally almost fell asleep while meeting WITH MY BOSS. Not good.
The surgery option was presented to me almost immediately but I said "Nuh uh" after researching it on the web. Not my brightest move, as I actually had come across some information which REALLY didn't apply to my case.
Months went by and then I went with my co-workers to one of those mall places where you can sit in a "racecar" and pretend to drive while a computer jostles around the car and shows you images via a screen that you see through the front "window". That effed me up REALLY badly. Thumpa thumpa thumpa. I hate NASCAR. My drugs were more of a "take this once daily" nature so it didn't help me when I was having an episode. The cold water trick only worked sometimes.
Then, that December, I was driving up a hill to work in really crappy snowy weather and some dimwit was RIGHT on my backside. Everyone around me was sliding and I was trying to just drive right, and this moron's trying to get in my trunk. So all of a sudden I screamed "WHAAAAAT is your problem??" and flipped him off, and then it happened again. Got what I deserved there, huh?
(Note that in none of these stories I was exercising or even exerting myself. That's the random nature of my problem. I also was not overweight then, so it wasn't that I needed to be exercising more.)
I went to the cardiologist's office that day and my pulse was over 200. Sports fans, that's three times what it usually is. They gave me a drug called atacand, or something like that. It was absolutely horrible. They put it in an IV, and for about 10 seconds you will feel like you are the Bad Witch and Dorothy's house just landed on top of you. Every cell in your body feels like it's being crushed into the exam table. It's this radioactive drug that drops your pulse waaaaaaaay down until the half life burns itself out. I just literally lay there moaning, it was so horrible.
I had that twice, about five minutes apart, becuase my pulse almost returned to normal and then it shot up again which REALLY sucked. It finally worked on the second try, and the doctor looked me in the eye and said "go to the E.R when this happens from now on. You should really have the surgery and get it over with."
At that point, more tests. Nada. Zilch. Nuclear stress test - now that's creepy, when they take a needle out of a metal box, inject the stuff into YOU, and then basically run away. Do I glow in the dark now?
I still couldn't deal with the thought of the surgery. I had to add a second medicine. Digoxin. Something for OLD people, darn it!! Sucky! After putting up with this for a while, I finally agreed to have surgery because I just felt like crap every day, from the medicines. At the time someone told me I was being a baby, and the doses were "nothing". Eff you.
I had an arrhythmia known as AV Node re-entry. The signal that sets the pace was more or less "looping back" through some extra tissue cells and repeating itself. The surgery to correct this is catheter ablation. They put a catheter or two in your groin, thread them up to your heart, use small electrical pulses to start and stop the arrhythmia, and decide exactly where to BURN TISSUE. Yup. Burn a little bit, to block the extra pathway, and we're all done. Want BBQ sauce with that?
I had the surgery in July. Shortly before then, I went out to lunch with a friend who really helped, because I WAS scared out of my mind. You were great, buddy. Thanks.
The surgery itself went VERY smoothly except that they had some trouble getting the catheters and IV's started, so I bruised like crazy. I stayed at an excellent hospital and learned that you should not brush your teeth if you are wearing a portable heart monitor because it freaks the nurses out. It looks like you're in v-tac or v-fib or something like that which is quite bad. I went home and slept for a day or two.
All went well, and I am now drug free. I have not taken a pill nor have I had an episode since my surgery. I don't even have to see the cardiologist anymore.
I know I've rambled on to an extreme extent here, but that's my story.
The final points I'd like to re-state here are:
1. Women can and DO need to worry about having a healthy heart - guys, take care of your women.
2. Don't research your medical problems on the internet, unless YOU are an MD, because you don't know what the hell you're doing.
3. My problem was nothing really, even though I've typed a million lines here. People have far more serious heart problems than me, and they need every dime the AHA can get for research, and we need better insurance in this country!!
4. Help me celebrate my RECOVERY by wearing red tomorrow.
xxoo,
Carly
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