I AM NOT…REPEAT…NOT A LAZY PERSON
March 31, 2015
I’m at home, out of the hospital, feeling well and also, very grateful to my wife, Lynn, for getting me out of the jam I was in, as well as to the many, many, many friends who showed their concern and support.
Several here on Facebook have already speculated there’d be a story behind this misadventure and I’m here to tell you, (gratefully here to tell you,) there is.
The story starts with Millie, my dear and departed mother, who taught me, indirectly, the meaning of an honest day’s work. I say indirectly because, to be honest, I don’t remember her ever speaking a word to me about the importance of conscientious work, the meaning of “work ethic”, slothfulness, which she claimed was the eight deadly sin, or the need to get the job done RIGHT and ON TIME.
Nope, if anything she babied me, was easy on me until the day she died, was judgmental of me only once when I returned home, drunk as a skunk, twenty minutes before I had to be cleaned up, dressed in coat and tie and at my high school graduation. That was the only time, and even then she didn’t say much…she simply wept as she helped me with my tie.
Now, Bebe, my father, was an entirely different story. Millie was nipping at Bebe’s heels from my first memories till the day she was checked into Stanford Hospital to die. She never stopped trying, though she knew in her heart it was futile, to instill in him just a smidgen of ambition, a millimeter of that old American work ethic.
Let me hasten to add here that my dad worked his entire adult life as a welder, provided for his family amply and never, ever shirked his responsibilities. It was just that his idea of a fall Sunday afternoon had at its center Y.A. Tittle and the San Francisco Forty-Niners while my mother’s had getting the garden tilled for a winter crop. The two were not to ever reconcile this difference in life’s prime directive, and what’s more the back and forth on the subject was more or less constant and, a therapist once told me, the very crux of my own personal demons. (After reading the rest of this story, you can judge for yourself.)
So what I’m saying is this—all the years while growing up the chiding and criticizing and accusations of good-for-nothing laziness went right over my pop’s head and landed squarely on me. It was ME who lacked ambition and ME who never wanted to do a lick of work and ME who began projects but never finished them…this last shortcoming being the deadliest of the eighth group of deadly sins. Why do kids do this to themselves? Why do we pick up baggage not even intended for us and drag it around for our entire lives, leaving holes inside of us that can never be filled and hearts that give out way too soon. Who knows? All I’m really sure of is that lying in bed night after night as a little boy listening to Millie and Bebe go at it has kept me in a mad dash my entire life. True, it got me through college, pushed me to start a successful business, and later in life a second one; it ensured I’d be a good provider for my family and now, in the last chapter, it’s given Lynn and me the freedom to enjoy our retirements. The time to enjoy my retirement? Well, the jury’s still out on that one.
Which brings me to the SHED. Given the peek I’ve shared into our family’s skeleton closet, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that most of the items on my bucket list at age 67 have something to do with creating, building, accomplishing something, and at the top of the list this spring has been a 20 foot by eight foot free standing shed where I can keep my gardening tools and supplies, riding mower, power washer rolling weed-whacker, etc. The fact that I’ve already got a shed that size, here before we bought the place, where I’ve kept all that stuff, or that I’ve got a barn/workshop five times the size of both sheds put together never really factored into the decision to build a shed number two. Hadn’t built a free standing structure before and was going to prove to myself (and maybe Millie) I could do it, and get it done RIGHT and on TIME!
The “on time” part is how this whole mess last weekend got set into motion. The plan was to get the shed built in March so I’d be all set to start the bluegrass season in April, which out here in California where I live, is when it starts. And I had a good jump on it until things started going wrong. First, the only lumber yard in town that sells 1X12 cedar boards ran out of them and wouldn’t get a new shipment for a week. Then my blood pressure started acting up and Lynn and my doc forbade me to lift anything heavier than my I-Phone or a good book until the BP was back in control. But even so, by Friday I was ready to get back to the shed, which would give me five days to meet my deadline. Doable if I didn’t dawdle.
Friday morning was spent cleaning up the work site for the final push to shed completion. At noon I drove downtown, treated myself to a couple of el pastor tacos from Pablito’s Taco Truck, and then went across the street to J.S. West Lumber. I gave Jack my list and a credit card, he rang up the order and directed me to the far end of the yard where the new shipment of “grass board” was stacked. “I’ll send John out to get you loaded up,” he promised. And if he had, the shed would be built, I wouldn’t be writing my life story this morning and I wouldn’t be looking a pacemaker square in the eyes.
Yep, I loaded the stuff myself. Twenty sixteen footer cedar grass boards, balancing on the cab of my pick up, both ends of the stack hanging well over the vehicle. And the lumber was wet, which added even more weight to the sixteen footers. About three quarters of the way through the job I began sweating profusely and, by the end, I was utterly exhausted and feeling, I don’t know, a little strange. Just about then John showed up, but according to JS West policy, which I have to admit is pretty much standard procedure at yards these days, he couldn’t help me tie the load down, which took another thirty minutes.
By the time I’d driven the three miles home I knew that the plan for the remainder of the day would have to be altered; there was no way I felt good enough to unload the cedar, let alone start nailing it up to cover the last two walls. Still, I was determined not to lose a half-day’s work so I began making the drawers and drawer faces that would go into the shed when the exterior was finally done. When I went down to the house Friday evening to cook dinner Lynn asked, “So, how did it go?” “Good,” I lied, “right on schedule.”
By the time we’d had dinner, watched a little TV and were ready for bed, I was feeling better. Still felt a little odd, a bit light headed from the ordeal at JS West, but ready for the final assault on the shed Saturday morning.
Tradition at our house is that Saturday mornings Dog Number One, Ed, and I go out and to fetch Egg McMuffins and triple lattes. Normally I begin gulping down my coffee on the drive back home, but I decided that I’d wait this time; I hadn’t taken my daily blood pressure reading yet and if it was running high again I knew I’d need to pass on the latte. Once home, I got myself strapped in, pressed the blue and red button on our high tech BP reader and was delighted to see a very nice 128/52. Excellent! But then my eyes scanned down to the heart rate, which was reading, a whopping 100 beats per minute; with all the meds I take to slow my heart down and stay in sinus rhythm, my normal HR is right around 50. And then the news got worse. The blood pressure machine was blinking that my heart was beating irregularly. I tried it again. 127/55/115 Irregular. Then 122/50/130 Irregular.
Eleven years ago an undiagnosed arrhythmia (atrial flutter) put me in the hospital with congestive heart failure. I almost died and had to undergo an electro cardio conversion, which is to say I was given a drug that stopped my heart and then slammed with a paddle which started the heart up again in sinus rhythm. A year later the ticker when out again, but this time instead of six days in the hospital it was only one night and drugs were able to achieve normal rhythm. To years later a third episode, similar to the second. But then eight years of normalcy. Until, of course, Saturday morning.
Lynn and I decided to wait thirty minutes before we checked again; the machine had occasionally given false positives in the past. But when we tried again we were looking at 120/40/147 Irregular. Eight and a half minutes later I walked into the Emergency Room and Lynn was parking the car.
A simple EKG immediately showed that I’d gone into atrial flutter. My heart rate was now raging and the attending doc quickly ordered a hefty dose of clonadhil aimed at slowing my heart and blood thinner injected into my stomach. After a few attempts with other meds to slow the heart the decision was made to admit me into the Hospital, which was done surprisingly fast, and once I was on the third floor a new doc tried a few new strategies, but still my heart rate soared, so now it was time for yet another move into the ICU.
When my bed was rolled into Room 338 there were already two people waiting there—Dustin, the ICU’s day shift nurse, and Jennifer, the shift’s lead nurse. Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but these two would be right smack in the middle of what would be one of the most inexplicable and wondrous eight seconds of my long life.
“Alright,” said Jennifer, “we’ve got a plan…what shall we call you?”
“Rick,” I whispered.
“Alright, Rick, we’ve got a plan for making you better. Or I should say, we almost have a plan. Dr. Thallange directed that we immediately put you on a metropalene drip, but Dustin and I have talked and we think we should first try a push.”
“Right,” said Dustin, a young, thin man, maybe thirty, with bright, confident eyes and an almost joyful smile, “we do, and I’ve put a call into Dr. Thallange, he’s in agreement on the push but wants to be here when we do it…and that should be in just a few minutes.”
“A push?” I struggled to get the words out.
“Yes,” said Jennifer, “we’ll use metropalene, a strong drug whose purpose is to slow the heart, but instead of a drip over a matter of three or four hours, we’ll do a injection into your IV. In fact, Dustin, let’s get a second one inserted just to be on the safe side. Who knows what else we’ll want to put in this poor guys blood stream.”
And with that, the two were gone and Lynn and I were there by ourselves in room 338, holding on for dear life. Both she and I had lived through the night mare that is losing a mother to cancer; both of us had experienced that slow, unrelenting slide with one bad piece of news, followed by another worse, and another worse and another worse. About an hour now into the hospital part of the drama, we could both recognize what seemed very much like the beginning of the slide. Bad to worse to worse…
Maybe thirty or forty minutes later Dr. Thallange appeared, flanked by Jen and Dustin. Jen edged in close to the right side of my bed and began attaching a syringe to one of the two IV connections on my right arm. The syringe was huge and full of a clear liquid. Dr. Thallagne, a tall young East Indian, looked down on me as he slowly and meticulously pulled a glove onto one hand, wriggling and pulling each finger and finally the thumb into the blue latex. Then he pulled on the second, with the same deliberateness and complete silence as he gazed deeply into my eyes.
The doctor looked at Jen and nodded for her to start the “push” and then he turned to me and finally, in a strong, bass voice, began to explain my condition and his and Jen’s and Dustin’s plan to address it. He confirmed my heart of out of sinus rhythm, my blood pressure was much too high, though not dangerously so at the moment, but the biggest concern was my heart rate. Until, he said, his team could address the first two problems they must first control the rate my heart was beating, which at this point was close to two hundred beats per minute.
Dr. Thallange continued to speak, explaining how the metropalene was meant to work, threading the eye of the needle to bring heart rate down while not exacerbating the BP and rhythm problems. But my eyes were now on Jen, whose thumb was ever so slowly forcing the plunger into the syringe. The movement was almost imperceptible but I could see the clear liquid slowly evacuate the syringe. Jen’s eyes were darting back and forth between the measurement lines on the glass tube and the monitor to my left and slightly behind me. It became suddenly clear to me that she was synchronizing the flow of the drug into my blood stream with the heart rate reading on the bright screen just behind me. So, I thought, this is why it’s called “push.”
The process took, I’m guessing, maybe seven or eight minutes, and when it was done the Dr. and the two nurses were all smiling broadly and nodding to one another.
“So, there you go, bud,” said Justin, his eyes shining, “a nice, respectable seventy beats per minute.”
“And now, sir,” Dr. Thallange said just before turning to leave, “we’ll start on that rhythm. I’ve got a cardiologist, Dr. Massenger, coming in to see you in the morning. We will decide tomorrow whether to convert your heart electrically or chemically. We shall fix you, Mr. Cornish. We shall.”
Lynn and I were, of course, ecstatic. She kissed me and told me she loved me, and I said the same back to her.
“That was only possible…getting my heart rate down…because you were here with me, my darling girl. Now, go home to the animals.” Lynn kissed me good by and left.
Alone for the first time since arriving at the hospital I lay on the bed, my eyes closed, and began doing a sort of damage assessment in my head. It was absolutely unarguable, I told myself, that the slide had been stopped. I was, of course, still very, very scared, but, dammit, the downward, inexorable slide had been stopped cold with the wonderful drop in my heart rate. Slowly I began to think of what tomorrow would bring. Would they try to convert tomorrow, or just make a decision on how they would do it? I prayed it wouldn’t be electro cardioversion. I’d gone through that eleven years ago, and while there was no physical sensation…you’re out cold when your heart’s stopped and restarted with the paddle…it’s still plenty freaky to think about your heart actually ceasing to beat, even if only for a second or two. And it also concerned me that when I was converted electrically it took six zaps…and I was told later that six was the maximum tries allowed. It almost didn’t work in 2004; what if it doesn’t work this time? What if….
That’s enough of that I thought. I turned on the TV and found a poorly produced documentary about the first locally generated television news show in Sacramento. It was 1955. One of the two newsmen on the original broadcast was being interviewed. He was an old, old guy and you could hear the pride in his voice when he described that first show.
“I remember,” he said looking into the camera, “we were going to have this city council member on but at the last minute…” And at that exact instant the old man’s face morphed from white to pink to red to brilliant crimson. At the same moment my face went from suddenly feeling flushed to being on fire. It was like molten lead was being poured over my entire body, starting at the top of my head and then down over my chest and torso. My head was exploding and the TV screen was now just a solid red blur. My rib cage was being compressed by the hot lead and the bones felt like they were about to splinter. And then, suddenly red lights and bells and a siren were going off all around me. I looked up at the door and saw a half dozen people running toward my room. One woman tripped and fell. Now Jennifer was clutching my hand and rubbing the top of it slowly but hard.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she kept repeating, and then, “okay, it’s starting back up…see, it’s going back up…you’re…it’s okay dear, you’re going to be okay.” And then Dustin yelled, Jen…JEN…look. LOOK. LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENED! Do you see? Do you?”
“Jen looked up at the monitor and stared for a moment. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed, “oh, my Lord. Rick, you’ve gone and done it yourself. Yes you have, you’ve gone and converted yourself.”
I tried to understand all that was happening, tried to ask but my lips wouldn’t move. And just as quickly as it had come, the red subsided. The old newscaster was his normal self. Finally I was able to mumble…”I did what?”
“I’ll tell you what you did, dude, you just put your heart back in perfect sinus rhythm.”
It was an hour or so later that Jen and Dustin felt comfortable telling me what had happened. My heart stopped beating for eight seconds…in cardiovascular medicine it’s referred to as a pause…and then, on it’s own, restarted in perfect rhythm. Not, said Jen, something any of them had ever seen, but she’d read about it happening in very rare instances.
So, there you go. Talk about your wild and crazy adventures. Friday morning I meet with my regular cardiologist and my GP and we decide if I need to have a pacemaker dropped into my chest. Wanna know how I feel about that? Just fine. And the shed? It’ll get done when it gets done.