I’m not sure why I decided to have a heart attack over the holiday, but my body decided it was time and didn’t really give me a chance for input. I should qualify it a little bit. I didn’t have an actual heart attack according to the final tests, but the preliminary tests were all red flags and shouting.
So, I woke up in the middle of the night on Wednesday night with a pain in the left side of my chest. My left arm was hurting and tingling with numbness.
Now, it is not something new. I have arthritis in my rib cage and I tend to sleep on my left side. So, although the pain was concerning, it was not reason to make a middle-of-the-night dash to the emergency room. I eventually got back to sleep on my right side. I was sluggish and ill the next morning, but I got a lot of house cleaning done and the chest pains were gone.
Thursday night the pains returned, but still not different than the arthritis pains that sent me to the cardiologist before, and not nearly as harsh and painful as the night before. Again the pain went away in the day.
Friday night I picked up my son the Marine at the airport. He was home on holiday leave. We talked about my chest pains over a meal at I-hop. He pulled rank on me and vowed to take me to the ER. I talked him down to Primacare because it’s cheaper, still not believing it was real heart pain.
The next morning Primacare didn’t go so well. The EKG machine there predicted a major earthquake… or a typhoon, or something… and the Prima-doctor got all serious in the face. “Do you want me to call an ambulance? We are required to make the offer in these situations.”
“No, no. My son is with me and can drive me to the Emergency Room. I promise I will go.”
And so I did.
At the ER they are very concerned that you don’t have anything in your pockets. They quickly dressed me in a hospital gown and then surgically removed $200 (due to the wondrous way my insurance company has of not paying their portion of the bill). So, lighter by that amount, they immediately hooked me up to their own EKG machine. I had so many patches attached to the hair on my chest that I was guaranteed to be bald-chested when it came time to rip them all off again. Then they repeated the EKG testing done earlier in the day. I swear, the same squirrel that was visiting Primacare when I was there earlier, sneaked into their EKG machine too and vigorously jumped up and down. So, there it was. The proof they needed that I had too much money left in my bank account. And so they put me inside the hospital.
Once inside, they rigged me up so one arm could be crushed by a BP sleeve every two hours, or more if they felt like it, and the other arm could be drained of blood so that they could tell if there was any further money in my bank account.
Three days later, the enzymes in my blood said that what I had was mysterious and not a heart attack. The stress test I had on Monday nearly killed me, and told them that I didn’t have enough money left in my bank account to keep in the hospital any longer. I got out still wearing my arm band and allergy warning band as reminders that I really, really didn’t want to go back, but life is like that, and I still don’t know what caused it all, or if I will have to return to deal with it later on.
No one here is asking to live forever, but you would think horsemen could be a little more sympathetic and not layer on quite so thick a layer of never-ending disease. And yet, I am reminded that I do plan to look at the benefits of the worst things that happen to me in life, and what good things they lead to. I have been ill enough in my life to become quite good at it. Arthritis has slowed me, but not stopped me. I still get around quite speedily, even though I often require a cane to do it. I am still not on insulin for my diabetes because of my diet and exercise efforts. I have learned how to cope with illness and keep going in spite of it.
An Unexpected Gift
This post is a movie review for Thor : Ragnarok , though I don’t really plan on talking about the movie very much. It was an excellent comic book movie in the same tongue-in-cheek comedy tradition as Guardians of the Galaxy. It made me laugh and made me cheer. It was the best of that kind of movie. But it wasn’t the most important thing that happened that night.
You see, I spent the weekend in the hospital thinking I had suffered a heart attack during the Thanksgiving holiday. I thought I was facing surgery at the very least. I knew I might have had an appointment to play chess with the Grim Reaper. It is a lot to worry about and drain all the fun out of life.
Well, one of the things that happened that day, Tuesday, my first full day out of the hospital and, hopefully, out of the woods over heart attacks, was that I received my new replacement bank card because my old one had a worn out, malfunctioning chip in it. So, I took my three kids to the movie at the cheapest place we could find. I tried to run my bank card for the payment, and it was summarily declined. I had activated it previously during the day, and there was plenty of money in the account compared to the price, but it just wouldn’t take. So I had to call Wells Fargo to find out whatever the new reason was for them to hate me. It turned out that it had already been activated, but a glitch had caused it to decline the charge. While I was talking to the girl from the Wells Fargo help desk, the lady who had gotten her and her husband’s tickets right before us put four tickets to the movie in my hand.
The middle-aged black couple had lingered by the ticket stand before going in to their movie just long enough to see a sad-looking old man with raggedy author’s beard and long Gandalf hair get turned down by the cheap-cinema ticket-taking teenager because the old coot’s one and only bank card was declined. They were moved to take matters into their own hands and paid for our tickets themselves.
That, you see, was the gift from my title. Not so much that we got our movie tickets for free, but that the world still works that way. There are still good people with empathetic and golden hearts willing to step in and do things to make the world a little bit better place. The gift they gave me was the reassurance that, as bad and black as the world full of fascists that we have come to live in has become, it still has goodness and fellow feeling in it. People are still moved to pay things forward and make good on the promise to “love one another”. I did not have a chance to thank them properly. I was on the phone with Wells Fargo girl when it happened. The only thing that couple got out of their good deed was thank-yous from my children and the knowledge that they had done something wonderful. I plan to pay it forward as soon as I have the opportunity. Not out of guilt or obligation, but because I need to be able to feel that feeling too at some point.
I do have one further gift to offer the world.
After we got home from the movie, I opened an email that contained the cover proof for my novel, Magical Miss Morgan. Soon I will have that in print also if I can keep Page Publishing from messing it up at the last moments before printing. It is a novel about what a good teacher is and does. It is the second best thing I have ever written.
Sometimes the gifts that you most desperately need come in unexpected fashion.
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Filed under commentary, compassion, happiness, healing, humor, illness, movie review, NOVEL WRITING, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as gifts of love, goodness in people, paying it forward, Thor Ragnarok