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Chapter 3: What Just Happened?
This chapter and next few that follow are smatterings of what I personally remember and what I have been told by those involved. Let’s begin after I experienced the searing pain and asked Ryan to get the nurse. I black out. Well, actually my brother witnessed my face going slack on one side, me dropping back on the bed and going into some type of seizure. My sister-in-law, husband and nurse have all collaborated this. I even had spittle coming out of my mouth at this time. Ladies, I know our men have seen us not look particularly attractive, but stroke face and spittle combined with the bed head I sure was the opposite of sexy. The nursing staff was frantic. Apparently a lot of “What did you give her?” and “Well, it’s got to be a reaction to something” brandished about the room.
The nurse who took charge asked everyone in the room if I had allergies to medication. No one knew for sure, so they called Mom. My mom reassured everyone that I had no previous allergies and only reacted poorly to Demoral in the past. With only Tylenol in my system, it was quickly resolved that my reaction had nothing what so ever to do with any medication given. My sister-in-law told my mother to come to the hospital because “it’s not good.” About this time, I woke up again.
I felt very lethargic and weak when I woke up. After telling the nurse I was sleepy, I asked for permission to go to sleep. Not knowing exactly what was wrong at the point, she tried to dissuade me from sleeping. She even told my husband to try to keep me awake. So he tried by being extremely nice. Apparently I was not in the mood for nice; I snapped at him. The following is one of the only two conversations I remember during this time.
“Hey. Hey, you need to stay awake,” my husband practically whispered.
I remember answering, “My name is not ‘hey’. You need to say my name.” I know my tone of voice during this time was slightly off. I continued to tell my husband, “You have to say it mean.”
To this my sister-in-law quipped, “Just wait until her mom get here. She can be mean.” But I had already passed out again.
This pattern continued for quite a while. Waking up…passing out…waking up…passing out. I can remember the worried expression on a male hospital workers face as he took my blood. I can remember the light from my room window casting eerie shadows on my floor. I can remember my mother leaning over the bed saying…something? I can remember touching my face without really feeling it. That is a very surreal experience in and of itself. But what I cannot remember is yelling at the people in my hospital room to “Get out! I don’t feel good. Can’t you guys just shut up?” Apparently, my own Mr. Hyde rears his ugly head when I don’t feel good. I have been told that I was not a very good patient during this time period. But I also know that my behavior was excused due to the fact that I didn’t “feel good.”
I do, however, remember the doctor yelling at me. That’s right. The only other conversation I remember involved a doctor yelling at a sick patient. You see during one of my awake times a nurse explicitly told me not to my leg.
So, being the obedient person that I am, I obeyed the nurse and refused to move my leg. Let’s take a time out to describe the leg.
A blood clot was lodged in my femoral artery. The lack of blood flowing through the leg really changes its appearance quite drastically. It had blown up to four times its normal size with red, spider veins coursing through it, and purple and white blotches.
Now that we have created such a wonderful mental picture, let’s return focus on the doctor yelling and the poor, sick, woman. The doctor told me to move my leg, and that it was okay now. I argued. I told the doctor that I was instructed not to move my leg. He told me that he was now instructing me to move my leg. We sparred verbally until my mother got involved. She told me to “obey” the doctor and to move my leg. So fine, I moved my leg—only it didn’t move.
Picture if you will the inside of a human head. The brain sending an electric signal through the torso to the leg demanding that it move. I know my brain was doing its job, but the leg was not cooperating. It wasn’t moving no matter how hard I tried. In fact, I watched the doctor take out a “dough cutter” and run it over my leg as if it were a ravioli. But, I could not feel it. Then he had the audacity to take his pen and jab it into the bottom of my foot. By all accounts I should have leapt off the bed at his berserker attack on my foot. I remained unmoved. I had no feeling from the tips of my toes to the curve of my hip. So, after a pretty uncharitable thought about the doctor’s bedside manner and manhood, I passed out.
Passing out…waking up…passing out…waking up until the bed started to move. A very big man in turquoise scrubs decided to shake my bed like a two year old with a Jello mold. While he was having the time of his life recreating the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 by manhandling my hospital bed, technicians from several different areas of study were readying themselves for my arrival in radiology. So, I was wheeled out of the room on the second floor, down the hall and into the elevator. Mr. Turqiose rammed my hospital bed into the elevators and slipped inside. As the doors closed on us a very nice man in a white doctor’s coat gently placed his hand on my leg. I passed out and remember nothing after that exact moment. Now, you will need to remember that man in white for he will appear later on in the story.
I’ll keep this part rather brief. Apparently, I met my mother (who used the stairs) as the elevators opened on the ground floor and we carried on a conversation as I was wheeled to radiology. While in radiology, apparently I was conversing (I like to think rather eloquently) with the tech administering an EKG and another woman who was running a sonogram monitor over my swollen leg, and even my OB/GYN. He came to circumcise my son and heard that I was having problems. In the middle of a sentence, I started convulsing, my eyes rolled back into my head, and I flat lined.
For those of you who did not grow up watcher Trapper John MD, Mash, ER or Gray’s Anatomy this is when I died. I suffered a series of strokes. At this point I threw a few more blood clots. One sliced through both kidneys, another nicked my lower right lung collapsing it, and the pi`ece de r`esistance the one hit the carotid artery near the brain that caused the heart attack which led to dying.
At this point a crash team was called, my OB/GYN started administering CPR and my mother, who works in a hospital and knows the codes, broke down as she realized the “stat” and “code blue” in radiology was for me. The words she uttered, “Heather’s in trouble; it’s not good” were probably the most understated that she ever uttered. It was at this point that surgery was eminent. However, not everyone thought it was a viable option. That hospital was not equipped for a major surgery. I would need to be transported. A helicopter to the nearest “major” hospital was out; it was agreed I would not survive the ride. My option was to be taken by ambulance to another hospital 10 minutes away. It became the only viable option—that is if anyone wanted to “waste time” operating on a lost cause.
So, four doctors passed on operating. That’s right. Four doctors decided that I did not deserve a chance. They all know that it was going to take a miracle given only a 1-2% chance of survival. Four doctors had no faith. However, one doctor left his daughter’s 10th birthday party to operate on me; he became my miracle worker.
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