On my way to get some milk, Elio, a childhood friend long gone, popped into my mind. I saw him hitting the hard clumps of soil in his garden with a vengeance. Like the unorthodox doctor that he was, Elio had decided to check whether the tightness in his chest increased with exercise. If so, it meant angina pectoris.
That image from decades ago was conjured by the slight tightness in my chest as I walked ahead. My return from the supermarket was easier. The bus appeared as I left the store, so I nixed the idea of hoofing it back home. Alighting from the bus, I bore the force of several knives violently cutting into my abdomen. Fortunately, this sensation only lasted a few seconds, so I crossed the street, reached my flat and placed the groceries on the counter. Suddenly I was struck with a jab of pain in my left shoulder.
Suddenly I was struck with a jab of pain in my left shoulder.
This time my mind flew back to my student days. I remembered how Papi, who lived on another continent, had wafted into my dreams to deliver a message: “I’ve come to say goodbye. My left shoulder hurts.” The following morning, I had woken up vaguely sad but serene as I headed to my college. The receptionist at the entrance silently handed me a telegram from my mother. “Your father died in his sleep last night,” it read. But that was not all.
Two weeks later I received a letter from a cousin who had checked up on my father on the eve of his passing. “Your father,” he wrote, “complained of a pain in his shoulder, which was not unusual on account of his arthritis. I helped him rub tiger balm on it and bade him goodnight.” If only…
Why did I recall those distant events? That’s it! I was having a heart attack! This realization triggered a wild frenzy in my heart – it was struggling to burst out of my rib cage. I did what I always do when facing a crisis. I lay down flat on my bed and tried to slow my breath, then I called a friend to take me to the hospital. I remembered that heart attacks in women are more difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are often different and more subtle, while most men experience heart attacks in a more dramatic manner.
The taxi driver dropped us off at a hospital reputed to be one of the best in the province, if not the country. It is also known for its long waiting periods at the ER. We were pleasantly surprised when the receptionist processed my admission quickly and assigned me to the “VIP” room. After pulling up my long medical history, he admitted me immediately. My friend and I later joked about my being a “woman with a history,” but on a more serious note we were thankful that I had heeded the warning signs that two dear people in my past had sent me from the great beyond.
The emergency ward resembled a white-tiled science-fiction gym with blue-robed people tethered to different pieces of equipment. The large window at the back was but a segment of a long glass wall stretching the length of the unit. As I was to discover further into my 11-day stay at the hospital, that transparent wall afforded a vast army of doctors, lab technicians, nurses and orderlies a good view of patients on the other side.
These health-care Samaritans would periodically slide through a narrow door to check in on me. Once a nurse shook my shoulder so roughly that, in a panic, I almost hit him. Apparently, I had been so profoundly asleep that he wanted to make sure I wasn’t fading away. For good measure, he asked me my name, my age, my day of admission and so forth, but I could not answer a very simple question: “What day is it today?” He finally gave up and answered it himself.
You don’t have to be comatose to lose track of night and day when you’ve been lying in a sterile white dungeon with no access to natural light.
You don’t have to be comatose to lose track of night and day when you’ve been lying in a sterile white dungeon with no access to natural light. Well, I shouldn’t call it a dungeon, because I was lovingly fed and attended to day and night. My only deprivation was uninterrupted sleep, a natural byproduct of intensive care. One of the cardiologists who visited me diagnosed me as having “takotsubo syndrome,” otherwise known as “broken heart syndrome.” Apparently, this cardiac event can be the result of emotional stress.
After nine days in the emergency unit, I was transferred to a high-tech room in the cardiology wing. Who released a bed? A patient who hadn’t made it or a patient who had? Best not to wonder. It was a proper room with a window that let some daylight in and had its own ensuite bathroom. Instead of a revolving rota of medical personnel, I was assigned a day nurse and a night nurse who kept vigil over me from a discrete window facing the corridor. A relentless cardiac monitor would let out a distress signal whenever I unplugged the lead to take a bathroom break.
The move to the cardiology unit was certainly a promotion. The allergy specialist was finally able to desensitize me to Aspirin, the imaging technician got a chance to take many pictures of my heart, and the angioplasty man could now proceed to introduce a stent into my blocked artery.
When they wheeled me to the angioplasty room, I was not surprised to see it full of overhanging equipment, plastic curtains to contain splashing blood, and two nurses ready to assist in the procedure. With limited experience, I could more or less anticipate what to expect. My memory is short on details but I did remember that catheters have a mind of their own when choosing which blood vessels to penetrate without making a fuss. They did not disappoint.
All went well until my vision of the world abruptly darkened and shrank into a diminishing dot, like at the end of a black-and-white cartoon in an old TV set. Was I dying? “I don’t feel well!” I croaked, but was greeted with silence. Then I fell into a dense and bottomless darkness punctuated by two malevolent neon faces with beady eyes and sneering lips on either side of a large metal box overhead. Twin witches? A large coffin? Finally, nothing, sheer nothingness until the lights abruptly switched on, turning this nightmarish black-and-white film into an overblown technicolour production without ominous music. From the far end of the room, I heard a woman saying: “She reacted to…”
From the near side I found myself struggling with another woman who was rhythmically backing off and lunging towards my chest chanting: “It’s going to be fine, it’s going to be fine,” or something along those lines, while she and I engaged in a push-hands tai chi exercise. Or so I thought. She was actually doing CPR on my chest.
I found myself struggling with another woman who was rhythmically backing off and lunging towards my chest chanting…
“Did I go under? Doctor!” He ignored me and continued removing needles and tubes. I rephrased my question. “Did my heart stop?”
“Yes, but only for a few seconds.”
Shortly afterwards, the same woman who had brought me back to life wheeled me to my room and into the arms of my worried daughter. “Shouldn’t an orderly be pushing this heavy bed? You must be exhausted,” I asked.
“There isn’t a budget for that. Besides, with a long weekend just around the corner, we are short-staffed.”
The following day, I was cheerfully given a list of prescriptions and a couple of referrals to a cardiology clinic and a rehabilitation centre for follow-up. “You should hear from them within four to six weeks.” I received no calls for close to two months until a timely intervention from a friendly doctor procured me a much-needed appointment. The hospital had let me out into the cold, but the informal network provided temporary warmth and relief.
My personal story is not unique, and like many other personal stories, it is an ongoing narrative. So is the story of Canada’s universal health-care system, staffed by highly trained and very caring professionals. It is nonetheless straining at the seams, though not yet broken at its core. Not yet.
