I woke up from a very needed sleep and in my own bed. This was a moment to celebrate. This was also the moment I began to think more deeply about what I had experienced and what the various conversations between the doctors and nurses had revealed about my outcome. I seriously thought about that 12% survival rate that I was told by the cardiologist and created an image in my mind that was pretty distressing. I imagined that a room was filled with 100 people of all ages, genders, and ethnicities. Suddenly the lights were turned off. Someone came into the room with a small flashlight and helped 12 people including me find their way out of the room through a single door that was just opened. When the door closed behind this group I asked this person with the flashlight what about the others in the room and was simply told “They did not make it”.
For me this thought was shocking. I had just realized that I was one of the very few who have survived a Widow Maker Heart Attack. And then I began to think about how many who were in that room that never really knew what had happened to them because they were unconscious from the start of the event, or who might have been conscious when the event started and then became unconscious as the event progressed. I then felt sad for the families who would never know how hard the first responders, doctors, nurses, and technicians most likely worked to keep their loved one in this world.
And then there are a small number of cardiac survivors who were very aware of everything going on around them in the ambulance heading to the hospital and they do know the efforts of the doctors, nurses, and technicians attending to them at the hospital in a specific life saving effort. Then there are those survivors who wake up after a day, or several days asking “What happened” and are given the news that they too just survived a major heart attack. I wondered how they took the news and how they felt. Were they in disbelief? Was their response “I can’t believe this just happened to me”. There are so many thoughts going through my mind about the last day and a half. I never thought in a million years that I was a candidate for a heart attack.
For me this reflection is profound in so many ways. I am a cardiac survivor now and I should find a way to celebrate this as I move forward in my remaining years, hopefully decades. I have been given a chance to continue and to rethink what this chance means.
I now need to settle into this new world that I have rejoined in a way that makes sense. I have survived, and now my next job is to recover, and what exactly does recover mean. I opened my phone and looked up Cardiac Rehab.
My recovery begins…
“Thoughts on my reflection. Please share them with me in the comment box below.”