Our Story
Nurse Heather tells us that everyone has a story. "It is their very own story that is unique to them". She pauses and the Relief Guy and I lean in to listen closer. You see we had learned that Nurse Heather is very wise and she has been been imparting her wisdom to us over the last couple of days. We did not want to miss one little tidbit of it. She pauses and takes a breath as we lean closer and then here it comes "It is very important that you share your story with people. You just might save a life"
She leaves the hospital room. Relief Guy a.k.a. John and I sit in silence. Then John turns to me and says "OK tell the story"
This was a curious turn of events. Only thirty minutes before without Nurse Heather anywhere in earshot, we had been talking about our story...about how we came to be in a critical care hospital room. I said to John "I am feeling a need to blog" John winced and expressed his desire that I leave this particular episode in our life out of my blog. Knowing it was more his story than mine, I said sure. Then about 30 minutes later Nurse Heather wandered into the room to take some vitals. She already knew our story but we got chatting about it again...and then she sent her wisdom our way.
Since then I have been mulling it over, slowly digesting it like a cool glass of ginger beer, waiting for the right time...maybe even waiting for the right ending. Now as we approach Remembrance Day I know this to be the right time because it is, in the end, a story of a soldier and his family.
You might think our story began on February 5th, the day of THE EVENT but it really started much earlier than that. While no one knows for sure most of the specialists agree that our story probably started on a dusty dirty road in Afghanistan that suddenly exploded in front of John in 2006. That explosion killed 2 soldiers riding in the vehicle in front of John, the very vehicle that John had been riding in right before the last rest break on the convoy. Everyone was thrown around in the blast badly. No one cared because two of our finest had just lost their lives. It didn't end there either. A second blast went off in the surrounding crowd a short time later as the Canadians were trying to evacuate their wounded and dead and remove their damaged vehicles. It was a long difficult day on top of an already long difficult convoy. But you survive and life goes on. John came home with all his aches and pains from nerve damage in his neck, to back pain and to an everlasting weariness that just goes on and on and on. Years go by. Our minds healed a bit, John's body healed a bit but the weariness continued. Finally in November of 2013, I got a call from John. He was in a hotel room in Vancouver and he was just so damn tired. He had started to feel sick to his stomache and he was coughing. It all felt respiratory to him and with the news full of the latest round of the Flu he was sure that was what was going on with him. For some reason, I thought of his heart.
"Are you sure you are not having a heart attack?" I ask him.
"I am sure" he responded. "I am just going to lie down for a bit and have some soup".
"Go to the hospital" I begged him.
"They are asking people with the flu to stay away from emergency departments" he responded. "I will have some soup".
I wasn't with him on this page as I had been watching him get more and more tired over the months... over the years...I resolved to call him in his hotel room regularly and if he did not answer even just once, I was going to call 911. He answered each time, started feeling better, delivered his speech at the conference and then got on a plane and came home.
"See, it was the flu" he said when he got home.
Then came the morning of February 5th. It was a cold -30 morning here. John went out to start his car and when he came back in he said, "Dang it that flu is back".
I looked at him and said "what do you mean?"
He said he did not feel well. His stomache was upset and his lungs were burning just like Vancouver. He was coughing. "It is probably just the cold air burning my lungs" he tells me. "I am going to just lie down for a bit".
I am looking at him and I am thinking 'it's your heart'. A quick google search revealed that nausea and respiratory signs can indicate a heart attack.
"I am taking you to the hospital" I tell John. "I think you are having a heart attack. If I am wrong then I am wrong...so what. Let's go"
John looks at me and recommends that I take a shower before we go.
"Sure" I tell him. "I will get right on that. You go to the truck". I didn't take a shower. I brought in the dogs and put them in the kennel, locked the house and headed out to the truck praying it would start on this cold cold morning. I had not plugged it in as I was not expecting to go anywhere that morning. We had been having problems with one of the tires on the car so I was not going to take that vehicle as the last thing I wanted was a flat on the side of the road. The truck started and off we went down the road on the 45 minute drive to the city.
I have to tell you that I did contemplate calling 911 from the house. Our closest hospital is only 10 minutes away. It is a small country hospital...a wonderful place...but I felt we needed to get to the city and to get to a cardiac specialist. I set my sights on the Royal Alexandra where our daughter Harriet was born. I knew it was a good spot.
I drove Alberta speed which is a 'little' over the speed limit. I wasn't passing anyone but I was keeping up a good clip. John sat quietly beside me slumping lower and lower. He had turned grey and was sweating profusely. He was now in immense pain and having difficulties breathing. I kept nudging him and saying "Are you there?" He would grunt back. I realized halfway into our trip that I would not be getting him to the hospital myself but I wanted to get across the city limits so that the ambulance that was dispatched would be dispatched from a city hospital with a cardiac care unit. John had become quite cold and clammy. His responses were slower and slower. At some point I had taken a hold of his wrist to track his pulse. As we crossed the long bridge over the North Saskatchewan River and into the city of Edmonton, I no longer had a pulse. It was rush hour traffic. I was in the fast lane and trying desperately to merge over so I could pull up on the side of the road and call 911 when there was suddenly a loud bang. The right rear tire of our brand new snow tires had just blown out its sidewall. The vehicles around us backed away from the bits of flying rubber and I veered across the lanes and onto the shoulder dialing 911 as I went.
I will never forget the 911 operator. What a dear she was. She was very calm and gentle. I don't recall being very excited either. I just told her my husband was having a heart attack and the back tire had blown on the truck and we need an ambulance. She was very chatty and had lots of questions for me. I was concerned that she had not dispatched the ambulance and was instead just chatting along. I asked her if she might consider calling an ambulance for us while we were chatting. She laughed and said that the ambulance was on its way. And then she just chat chat chatted along asking after John and how/if he was responding.
"If I shove him hard he grunts", I tell her. "Do you think the ambulance might be here soon?" I ask. It has only been a minute or two but it has felt like an hour.
"Very soon" she tells me. "You should start hearing sirens and seeing lights now". And then I do but they have come across the overpass from the wrong direction and they are going to have to drive down the exit ramp going the wrong way!
"Oh no", I tell the lovely lady. "They are coming from the wrong direction and they can't drive down the exit ramp the wrong way. I don't think John will make it while they go around." I tell her with great concern.
"It is OK", she tells me. "Ambulances are allowed to drive the wrong way down an exit ramp".
And then they were at the truck and I was so so relieved to no longer have charge of this situation. John of course tried to rouse himself and put on a brave face so he could tell them he had just burned his lungs in the cold air...or had a bit of heart burn from the meal last night...or some other such nonsense. I was concerned they might believe him. I grabbed the arm of one of the ambulance attendants as John babbled on and said "He is an Afghanistan Veteran". The attendant looked at me and nodded and whisked John off into the ambulance. I thought why in the hell did I say that? It is so funny that I linked Afghanistan into things even then. So instinctual. Afterwards the ambulance attendant told me I could not have said anything more perfect to get my point across. With that line he knew he had someone who had seen a lot, dealt with a lot of pain and would downplay it all. He knew not to listen to any reassurances of well-being that John might send his way. He paid attention to the monitors instead. He knew none of this was going to be 'normal'. With John loaded into the ambulance I suddenly noticed that a firetruck was there too. I love firemen. They are always such goodhearted people. They circled around me and we all circled around the blown tire. They had never seen anything like that on a domestic vehicle just the big commercial trucks. They made me take a picture. I pulled out my AMA card to get that ball rolling and they said, "put it away. We'll change your tire!" And in -30 they crawled over and under that truck and changed the tire. The ambulance sat on the side of the road. The firemen were concerned about why it was not leaving. I was concerned. I found out later that the telecommunications system was down between the hospital and the ambulance so the clever paramedic who had listened to me blurt out John's Afghanistan veteran status was using his personal cell phone to take pictures of the monitor and then sending them via text messages to the head of cardiology at the Royal Alex. John was not responding to the drugs normally. They knew it was his heart but they were not sure what was going on. There is a drug that you give heart attack victims to open up their arteries and help them out but you do not give it to them if they are going into surgery right away. They were trying to figure out what to do with John. The decision was made...surgery.
The door of the ambulance flew open and the attendant yelled at me to hop in.
"I will just drive behind you", I called back.
"You can't, you have a flat" he yelled back.
"Not anymore" I responded waving toward my friendly firemen.
"Follow us", he yelled back at me.
"Really?" I responded. "Like at your speed?" I asked hopefully.
He sighed (I guess he has had that question a few times) "just go to the Royal Alex. Your husband will be in surgery. They are waiting for him now".
With that the ambulance peeled out onto the road going the wrong way (love it!). Traffic resumed behind the ambulance right away and I couldn't get out onto the road. Not until the firetruck pulled out and blocked off the road for me (love them!). By the time I got to the hospital, parked, found the critical care unit and called family, John was being wheeled out of the OR. He was awake and had a colour in his skin that I had not seen for a long time.
"I feel fantastic" he tells me.
I am a little taken aback having trouble reconciling the slumped over unresponsive, grey, sweating person with this rosy cheeked fellow who is 'feeling fantastic'. As we spend time in the cardiac care unit over the next few days, we learn that you just need to get them to the hospital with a bit of a heartbeat and they can and do perform miracles. John did have a massive heart attack and while he did feel fantastic coming out of surgery, he quickly became very tired. There was damage to his heart muscle and he would have to be careful over the next 30 days to make sure the repair to his artery wall would hold. He also had to do cardio rehab over the next few months to repair the damaged heart muscle.
Everyone has their own story in the cardiac care unit. John's was a little unique in that he has none...absolutely NO heart disease. His LAD (the widowmaker artery) was 95% blocked with a blood clot. There was no plaque. In fact, a picture of John's heart shows that all of his arteries are big and beautiful and entirely free of plaque. For some reason, the wall of the LAD weakened and then over time started to leak. White blood cells rushed to the leak and built up around it as they are supposed to do and eventually almost entirely blocked off that artery with a great big blood clot. While the specialist will never know for sure what caused the leak, the prevailing opinion is that John's body suffered a shock that somehow damaged that artery wall. When told of the two IED attacks from Afghanistan, they nodded knowingly and said 'Yep that would do it'.
As for the drive to the hospital, we were told by everyone that we made the right decision that morning. John would not have survived going to our local hospital and then a transfer back to the city...even by helicopter. He barely survived our journey which was 45 minutes. Sooo if you live way out on a country road east of Edmonton and your road has two names which causes a lot of issues with emergency personnel locating your property in the first place then it is a good idea to drive to the city; otherwise CALL 911. In other words, as the cardiac specialist told me that day in the hospital, 'you did the right thing but don't ever tell anyone I said that. Tell them to call 911'. And minutes count, seconds count...don't take a shower :)
Finally listen to your body and listen to your instincts. John knew something was wrong. He has known it for months and months and months...His symptons were not typical. He had a cough, his lungs burned and he was sick to his stomache. In the last minutes when it would have been truly too late to get him help, he did have the sore jaw and extreme pain in his chest. I am glad we left when he thought it was the 'flu'. Don't you put off checking out your symptons. The only way you know what your heart attack symptons will be is by having a heart attack. Apparently they are always the same. If you are unfortunate enough to have a second heart attack, then you will recognize the symptons. Until then you don't know what they will be until it happens. So if you are not feeling right and thinking something might be wrong...just go get it checked out. Cardiac Specialists can perform miracles but it helps them out a lot if you have a wee bit of a heartbeat left when you get to them.
So as we approach Remembrance Day I thought it was time for me to finally get my big girl pants on and share this story like Nurse Heather said I should. This is a difficult time of year for our family. John has many memories at this time of year. I have many memories at this time of year. Our kids have many memories at this time of year. Our family has had too many good-byes even though we are thankful they were not forever. On our 5th wedding anniversary, John and I actually calculated that we had lived together for less than a year. A typical state for most families
in the Armed Forces. We live today with the scars of an Army family and the quirks they bring. We are proud to have served and just so very sad at the cost of freedom that others have paid. We are thankful that John's heart attack is just a memory even though it reminds us of war. If our youngest could put a tracking device into John so that she could know his every movement, she would. She doesn't like people leaving. She doesn't like the unknown. She thinks enough is enough. And that is who she is and who she will forever be because her father is a soldier.
Like most soldiers, John finds it difficult to share his experiences. He does it and sometimes I do it for him because, as difficult as it is, sometimes it is the right thing to do. If our story can help save a life then we are pleased to share it. We remain thankful at this time of year for everything that we have and for the many sacrifices made by others for our privileges and freedoms.
She leaves the hospital room. Relief Guy a.k.a. John and I sit in silence. Then John turns to me and says "OK tell the story"
This was a curious turn of events. Only thirty minutes before without Nurse Heather anywhere in earshot, we had been talking about our story...about how we came to be in a critical care hospital room. I said to John "I am feeling a need to blog" John winced and expressed his desire that I leave this particular episode in our life out of my blog. Knowing it was more his story than mine, I said sure. Then about 30 minutes later Nurse Heather wandered into the room to take some vitals. She already knew our story but we got chatting about it again...and then she sent her wisdom our way.
Since then I have been mulling it over, slowly digesting it like a cool glass of ginger beer, waiting for the right time...maybe even waiting for the right ending. Now as we approach Remembrance Day I know this to be the right time because it is, in the end, a story of a soldier and his family.
You might think our story began on February 5th, the day of THE EVENT but it really started much earlier than that. While no one knows for sure most of the specialists agree that our story probably started on a dusty dirty road in Afghanistan that suddenly exploded in front of John in 2006. That explosion killed 2 soldiers riding in the vehicle in front of John, the very vehicle that John had been riding in right before the last rest break on the convoy. Everyone was thrown around in the blast badly. No one cared because two of our finest had just lost their lives. It didn't end there either. A second blast went off in the surrounding crowd a short time later as the Canadians were trying to evacuate their wounded and dead and remove their damaged vehicles. It was a long difficult day on top of an already long difficult convoy. But you survive and life goes on. John came home with all his aches and pains from nerve damage in his neck, to back pain and to an everlasting weariness that just goes on and on and on. Years go by. Our minds healed a bit, John's body healed a bit but the weariness continued. Finally in November of 2013, I got a call from John. He was in a hotel room in Vancouver and he was just so damn tired. He had started to feel sick to his stomache and he was coughing. It all felt respiratory to him and with the news full of the latest round of the Flu he was sure that was what was going on with him. For some reason, I thought of his heart.
"Are you sure you are not having a heart attack?" I ask him.
"I am sure" he responded. "I am just going to lie down for a bit and have some soup".
"Go to the hospital" I begged him.
"They are asking people with the flu to stay away from emergency departments" he responded. "I will have some soup".
I wasn't with him on this page as I had been watching him get more and more tired over the months... over the years...I resolved to call him in his hotel room regularly and if he did not answer even just once, I was going to call 911. He answered each time, started feeling better, delivered his speech at the conference and then got on a plane and came home.
"See, it was the flu" he said when he got home.
Then came the morning of February 5th. It was a cold -30 morning here. John went out to start his car and when he came back in he said, "Dang it that flu is back".
I looked at him and said "what do you mean?"
He said he did not feel well. His stomache was upset and his lungs were burning just like Vancouver. He was coughing. "It is probably just the cold air burning my lungs" he tells me. "I am going to just lie down for a bit".
I am looking at him and I am thinking 'it's your heart'. A quick google search revealed that nausea and respiratory signs can indicate a heart attack.
"I am taking you to the hospital" I tell John. "I think you are having a heart attack. If I am wrong then I am wrong...so what. Let's go"
John looks at me and recommends that I take a shower before we go.
"Sure" I tell him. "I will get right on that. You go to the truck". I didn't take a shower. I brought in the dogs and put them in the kennel, locked the house and headed out to the truck praying it would start on this cold cold morning. I had not plugged it in as I was not expecting to go anywhere that morning. We had been having problems with one of the tires on the car so I was not going to take that vehicle as the last thing I wanted was a flat on the side of the road. The truck started and off we went down the road on the 45 minute drive to the city.
I have to tell you that I did contemplate calling 911 from the house. Our closest hospital is only 10 minutes away. It is a small country hospital...a wonderful place...but I felt we needed to get to the city and to get to a cardiac specialist. I set my sights on the Royal Alexandra where our daughter Harriet was born. I knew it was a good spot.
I drove Alberta speed which is a 'little' over the speed limit. I wasn't passing anyone but I was keeping up a good clip. John sat quietly beside me slumping lower and lower. He had turned grey and was sweating profusely. He was now in immense pain and having difficulties breathing. I kept nudging him and saying "Are you there?" He would grunt back. I realized halfway into our trip that I would not be getting him to the hospital myself but I wanted to get across the city limits so that the ambulance that was dispatched would be dispatched from a city hospital with a cardiac care unit. John had become quite cold and clammy. His responses were slower and slower. At some point I had taken a hold of his wrist to track his pulse. As we crossed the long bridge over the North Saskatchewan River and into the city of Edmonton, I no longer had a pulse. It was rush hour traffic. I was in the fast lane and trying desperately to merge over so I could pull up on the side of the road and call 911 when there was suddenly a loud bang. The right rear tire of our brand new snow tires had just blown out its sidewall. The vehicles around us backed away from the bits of flying rubber and I veered across the lanes and onto the shoulder dialing 911 as I went.
I will never forget the 911 operator. What a dear she was. She was very calm and gentle. I don't recall being very excited either. I just told her my husband was having a heart attack and the back tire had blown on the truck and we need an ambulance. She was very chatty and had lots of questions for me. I was concerned that she had not dispatched the ambulance and was instead just chatting along. I asked her if she might consider calling an ambulance for us while we were chatting. She laughed and said that the ambulance was on its way. And then she just chat chat chatted along asking after John and how/if he was responding.
"If I shove him hard he grunts", I tell her. "Do you think the ambulance might be here soon?" I ask. It has only been a minute or two but it has felt like an hour.
"Very soon" she tells me. "You should start hearing sirens and seeing lights now". And then I do but they have come across the overpass from the wrong direction and they are going to have to drive down the exit ramp going the wrong way!
"Oh no", I tell the lovely lady. "They are coming from the wrong direction and they can't drive down the exit ramp the wrong way. I don't think John will make it while they go around." I tell her with great concern.
"It is OK", she tells me. "Ambulances are allowed to drive the wrong way down an exit ramp".
And then they were at the truck and I was so so relieved to no longer have charge of this situation. John of course tried to rouse himself and put on a brave face so he could tell them he had just burned his lungs in the cold air...or had a bit of heart burn from the meal last night...or some other such nonsense. I was concerned they might believe him. I grabbed the arm of one of the ambulance attendants as John babbled on and said "He is an Afghanistan Veteran". The attendant looked at me and nodded and whisked John off into the ambulance. I thought why in the hell did I say that? It is so funny that I linked Afghanistan into things even then. So instinctual. Afterwards the ambulance attendant told me I could not have said anything more perfect to get my point across. With that line he knew he had someone who had seen a lot, dealt with a lot of pain and would downplay it all. He knew not to listen to any reassurances of well-being that John might send his way. He paid attention to the monitors instead. He knew none of this was going to be 'normal'. With John loaded into the ambulance I suddenly noticed that a firetruck was there too. I love firemen. They are always such goodhearted people. They circled around me and we all circled around the blown tire. They had never seen anything like that on a domestic vehicle just the big commercial trucks. They made me take a picture. I pulled out my AMA card to get that ball rolling and they said, "put it away. We'll change your tire!" And in -30 they crawled over and under that truck and changed the tire. The ambulance sat on the side of the road. The firemen were concerned about why it was not leaving. I was concerned. I found out later that the telecommunications system was down between the hospital and the ambulance so the clever paramedic who had listened to me blurt out John's Afghanistan veteran status was using his personal cell phone to take pictures of the monitor and then sending them via text messages to the head of cardiology at the Royal Alex. John was not responding to the drugs normally. They knew it was his heart but they were not sure what was going on. There is a drug that you give heart attack victims to open up their arteries and help them out but you do not give it to them if they are going into surgery right away. They were trying to figure out what to do with John. The decision was made...surgery.
The door of the ambulance flew open and the attendant yelled at me to hop in.
"I will just drive behind you", I called back.
"You can't, you have a flat" he yelled back.
"Not anymore" I responded waving toward my friendly firemen.
"Follow us", he yelled back at me.
"Really?" I responded. "Like at your speed?" I asked hopefully.
He sighed (I guess he has had that question a few times) "just go to the Royal Alex. Your husband will be in surgery. They are waiting for him now".
With that the ambulance peeled out onto the road going the wrong way (love it!). Traffic resumed behind the ambulance right away and I couldn't get out onto the road. Not until the firetruck pulled out and blocked off the road for me (love them!). By the time I got to the hospital, parked, found the critical care unit and called family, John was being wheeled out of the OR. He was awake and had a colour in his skin that I had not seen for a long time.
"I feel fantastic" he tells me.
I am a little taken aback having trouble reconciling the slumped over unresponsive, grey, sweating person with this rosy cheeked fellow who is 'feeling fantastic'. As we spend time in the cardiac care unit over the next few days, we learn that you just need to get them to the hospital with a bit of a heartbeat and they can and do perform miracles. John did have a massive heart attack and while he did feel fantastic coming out of surgery, he quickly became very tired. There was damage to his heart muscle and he would have to be careful over the next 30 days to make sure the repair to his artery wall would hold. He also had to do cardio rehab over the next few months to repair the damaged heart muscle.
Everyone has their own story in the cardiac care unit. John's was a little unique in that he has none...absolutely NO heart disease. His LAD (the widowmaker artery) was 95% blocked with a blood clot. There was no plaque. In fact, a picture of John's heart shows that all of his arteries are big and beautiful and entirely free of plaque. For some reason, the wall of the LAD weakened and then over time started to leak. White blood cells rushed to the leak and built up around it as they are supposed to do and eventually almost entirely blocked off that artery with a great big blood clot. While the specialist will never know for sure what caused the leak, the prevailing opinion is that John's body suffered a shock that somehow damaged that artery wall. When told of the two IED attacks from Afghanistan, they nodded knowingly and said 'Yep that would do it'.
As for the drive to the hospital, we were told by everyone that we made the right decision that morning. John would not have survived going to our local hospital and then a transfer back to the city...even by helicopter. He barely survived our journey which was 45 minutes. Sooo if you live way out on a country road east of Edmonton and your road has two names which causes a lot of issues with emergency personnel locating your property in the first place then it is a good idea to drive to the city; otherwise CALL 911. In other words, as the cardiac specialist told me that day in the hospital, 'you did the right thing but don't ever tell anyone I said that. Tell them to call 911'. And minutes count, seconds count...don't take a shower :)
Finally listen to your body and listen to your instincts. John knew something was wrong. He has known it for months and months and months...His symptons were not typical. He had a cough, his lungs burned and he was sick to his stomache. In the last minutes when it would have been truly too late to get him help, he did have the sore jaw and extreme pain in his chest. I am glad we left when he thought it was the 'flu'. Don't you put off checking out your symptons. The only way you know what your heart attack symptons will be is by having a heart attack. Apparently they are always the same. If you are unfortunate enough to have a second heart attack, then you will recognize the symptons. Until then you don't know what they will be until it happens. So if you are not feeling right and thinking something might be wrong...just go get it checked out. Cardiac Specialists can perform miracles but it helps them out a lot if you have a wee bit of a heartbeat left when you get to them.
So as we approach Remembrance Day I thought it was time for me to finally get my big girl pants on and share this story like Nurse Heather said I should. This is a difficult time of year for our family. John has many memories at this time of year. I have many memories at this time of year. Our kids have many memories at this time of year. Our family has had too many good-byes even though we are thankful they were not forever. On our 5th wedding anniversary, John and I actually calculated that we had lived together for less than a year. A typical state for most families
in the Armed Forces. We live today with the scars of an Army family and the quirks they bring. We are proud to have served and just so very sad at the cost of freedom that others have paid. We are thankful that John's heart attack is just a memory even though it reminds us of war. If our youngest could put a tracking device into John so that she could know his every movement, she would. She doesn't like people leaving. She doesn't like the unknown. She thinks enough is enough. And that is who she is and who she will forever be because her father is a soldier.
Like most soldiers, John finds it difficult to share his experiences. He does it and sometimes I do it for him because, as difficult as it is, sometimes it is the right thing to do. If our story can help save a life then we are pleased to share it. We remain thankful at this time of year for everything that we have and for the many sacrifices made by others for our privileges and freedoms.
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