Month: May 2016

Long QT Syndrome. Yeah, I have never heard of that until the doctors diagnosed me as having it while I was in the hospital.

What is it? Well the best way that was explained to me is, “your heart is like a house, for you the structure is good. But like a house  with electrical problems some people can have some electrical shorts. Your heart has an electrical short and it cuts out from time to time. If your heart can’t fix this “short” then there is a possibility of it stopping.”

But really it has to do with your rhythms.  There is an interval called the “QT”, and people who have the syndrome can have a longer  QT interval.

Really reading about this made me think, of all the times I would just be sitting, in a classroom or while I painted, nothing super active or even stressful and I could feel my heart “flutter” and race like I had been running. I told my mom when I was a kid, sure she thought I was making it up (I was a very imaginative kid), and who would think their pretty healthy kid would have heart issues?

I think before I had my son, I finally went to a doctor and explained to them what was going on. I was getting tried of the “fluttering” feelings and the fainting feelings. They did a thyroid test and some other blood work. Basically after all of this I was told it was most likely in my head. Of course I was upset, and was like forget it, it really wasn’t worth it to push.

Lesson learned, we all know ourselves and most of us are in tune with our bodies. If something isn’t feeling right, you need to keep looking. I often wonder if I had pushed and gotten an EKG, would they have found the Long QT syndrome, I could have bypassed the whole sudden cardiac arrest.

   People who survive from a cardiac arrest are incredible. If you really think about as soon as someone’s heart stops time is ticking against them. Cardiac arrest, is considered to be the most emergency you can get. On average a person who go into cardiac arrest only have 6 minutes to live if the condition goes untreated. According to Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation each day in the U.S. survival rate is 10% and in children is only 5%.

Transweb.org has really good information on what happens to the brain when it is deprived of oxygen; after 1 minute of not breathing brain cells begin to die, survival is still high; 3 minutes, serious brain damage is likely; 10 minutes, many brain cells have died and recovery is unlikely; 15 minutes, recovery is virtually impossible.    

 The time averages  that I found for an ambulance to reach an emergency ranges from 6 minutes up to 11 minutes. There are reasons from traffic, to poor communication from dispatch to the Ambulance Company, other emergencies, and distance. So you can image that the chances of help coming in time are very low. Surprisingly, there is also no government mandate on ambulance arrival times.

From what I was told, I was deprived of oxygen somewhere between 5 and 8 minutes. There’s not a real accurate time that I have been given on just how long. Defiantly no one was keeping time they were focused on saving me. There was also miscommunication to the EMT’s on the call that was placed from my teammates to get help for me. Thank goodness that the EMT’s got there and took me to the hospital. It’s just crazy how things can unfold so quickly, and am very thankful for everyone who was there.

 

 

One memory I do have, is I am pretty sure my friends were in my hospital room talking. I remember saying “you can’t kill a cockroach.” And I don’t know if I said this out loud or if I was just thinking it, but all I could think was “this was the only time I could ever really use this saying”, and giggled. Of course I would say something ridiculous. Not sure how long after I woke up that I said this, but such a typical thing for me to do.

My friends made the most amazing poster for a fundraiser they did for me to help pay for my medical bills. I love those girls!

Even when they woke me up, I still wasn’t really with it. They put so many drugs into me, it was quite a cocktail. Not sure how long it was before my short term memory caught up. I know I repeated many of my  questions. I honestly could not remember. You wake in a hospital and you have no memory on how you got there or why the hell your even there.

I know my husband was asked the same questions over and over by me and on top of it he had to make decisions he thought he would never have to make. But he finally had enough and said “you keep asking me the same question and I have answered it like a hundred times.” I felt shut down, that I couldn’t grasp what was being said to me. I felt like a child who always asks why, why, why. Finally the parent just has enough and looses it. I know it wasn’t meant to be that way, but it did make me feel more isolated.

 

Every now and then I get asked if I had an out of body experience. Pretty sure I did not. There were no thoughts or “dreams”, the reality is it was like there was nothing. No time,  no light from heaven, no flashback on my life, nothing like that movie Sublime.  Honestly, when someone asks me that I just say “I don’t think so”. I think some people look to those who have been near death thinking they may have a link to what the afterlife could be like. And I am not saying that people haven’t had these experiences, I am just not one of those. I just can feel the disappointment of someone who really hopes I have something exciting to tell.

For me I think it was in a way an escape from myself. I have a tendency to live in my own head. My thoughts and anxieties never stop. I never learned to shut it down, so I think this was to help my healing process. Stress never helps heal.

Yes, I have had some nightmares. Some have been about the ambulance ride, seeing people working on me, but all in silence. Also some of my heart stopping, having a visual on my heart in my chest just stopping for some reason this one is always in black and white. Which is strange because I usually dream in vivid color.

For me I think it was in a way an escape from myself. I have a tendency to live in my own head. My thoughts and anxieties never stop. I never learned to shut it down, so I think this was to help my healing process. Stress never helps heal.

 

While the nurses on my team did CPR on me, the EMT’s finally showed up and got me into the ambulance I was taken to the hospital. One of my super amazing teammates went with me. Thank god she did. The EMT’s gave me several epinephrine shots and used the defibrillator on me. When we got to the hospital I still did not have a strong heart beat. To this day I swear I feel like such a dick for putting people through this, but I am grateful they were there for me.

When they got a heart rate and got me as stable as possible they went ahead and did brain cooling on me. When I was told this, I thought the put coolant in my blood, like a car’s cooling system, Transformer type thing. Silly imagination, it was not at all like that. People who visited me during this time told me that I felt like ice. Kind of eerie that before I was considered to be living or dying, I was in a cold death like state in order to give me chance to live. I am not sure how long they did this to me, but the outcome at this point was not good for me. It’s pretty amazing what putting someone on ice can do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBa0H96s10o&feature=youtu.be

 

 

Let me tell you a little history about me and catheters, I hate them. I have had 2 kids and both kids I had to have C-sections with both of them. The first one was probably the worst. After the surgery which they lay your organs out and remove your baby sow you up and off you go. Well, you have the catheter in so here comes my nurse, she tells me I have to walk before she removes the catheter (evil).  I got out of bed and tried walking down the hall, I thought I was going to pass out. She, after my husband told her I was going to pass out took me back to my bed and removed it. Then I went to take a piss, that hurt like hell! I held onto the handicapped bars and screamed. Now the second time the nurse was a godsend, She had me hit my morphine drip thingy took it out and then helped me to the bathroom. It still hurt but I wasn’t feeling like I was going to pass out.

This brings me to my catheter after my cardiac arrest. Now, I really didn’t know how long this has been in… I will say they went ahead and removed it (I don’t remember that part). So, these memories came back, I maybe had those first catheters like an hour to two hours for the C-sections. All I can say I wasn’t looking forward for that first piss, especially how long it had been in.

My nurse who I called Big Bird, (apparently from the stories told we were not a good patient/nurse pair, which I am sure I will have more stories of this relationship) she “kindly” came in and told me I had to pee, not only pee but pee in one of those toilet cup things. Fearing the knowing of the on slot of pain I know is going to happen, I told her I didn’t have to go. She then said “you will go”, I said “no”, after a few back and forth jabs she finally  says, “if you don’t pee I will put the catheter back in”. My worst fear, she won… Ugh!

Now I get out of bed with the help of my husband. I am pretty sure that my legs were jacked from being confined in the bed for I don’t really know how long. I get on my wobbly legs with my little bag of fluids on wheels, and make my way to the bathroom. Now to give you a little visual I am ass naked under the hospital gown, hunched over and moving very slowly. This hospital room is pretty spacious and it is a long way over to that bathroom… I press onward with the threat of the catheter being returned to my pee hole. I am sweating and in pain, finally we make it to the toilet. My husband sits my atop the toilet and leaves me to do my thing.

I sit for a moment, knowing what is about to take place. Here we go, I let loose and it feels like fire and razor blades, flowing out of my urethra! I am sweating bullets holding onto the handicap bars for dear life hovering over the toilet seat. Finally it stops and I realize that I have over filled the pee cup thing. Glorious, maybe my firry, razor blade pee will spill onto her shoes. I make my way back to bed and pass out. Unfortunately, I passed out and I don’t know if my pee ever made contact with Big Bird shoes.

 

 

 

This is something that really bothers me, this is the point where I am completely out of control. I have no say in what is going on with my body. It’s so weird to think back on something like that. People tell you what happened and you have no idea (and I wasn’t even drinking). Also, there is a sense of embarrassment,  in the way I would never willingly put people that I care about through something like that. If your drinking and black out or whatever, people tell you the stupid things you did, you can just kinda laugh it off. This isn’t something you can just laugh off, and I do feel like a dick at times for scaring people like this. They saw me die.

Often times I wonder if I felt anything, did I feel something coming on? Did I struggle for air? When my heart stopped, did it hurt? These are still such bizarre questions for me to think about, because I really have no way to answer them.

This blog is started to really get out what I have been going through the last two years since my cardiac arrest May 28, 2014. To my friends and family who might read this, I love you and a huge thank you for supporting me through all of this. This is my process of working through this.

Those who don’t know me or the event that lead up to this. I play roller derby and I had decided to start back up after taking time off to move and having my daughter. Now I don’t remember much, I think I went to derby 101 and then went to Phoenix to visit friends (I don’t even really remember the trip). I went to my first actual practice, I am sure I was excited to get back and be with my friends/teammates again. From what I have been told I had the cardiac arrest during the warm-up part of the practice.

From what I have been told when I first went down it looked like I was having a seizure, so the thing to do when someone is having a seizure is to let them do their thing. Well, I wasn’t coming out of it and I was starting to turn blue. So the amazing nurses that I skate with went into action.