Step 1. The pre-game
I have been smoking steadily for thirty years. I remember buying them and trying them at a younger age, but as a freshman in high school, I had a stolen pack from my parents, and there was a Spanish class I was always late getting to because we were off campus smoking a cigarette. Dude looked at me near the end of a smoke one day and asked if that was the same pack I had bveen smoking from all week. It had actually lasted about two weeks by then. So that afternoon I went and bought my own pack, and smoked about seven in a row in the back yard before anybody else came home. Been smoking steadily, about a pack a day off and on, since then.
Step 2. The scrimmage
I always figured it would be the lungs to get me one day, sooner rather than later. I know what the smoking does and I have learned to adjust my body to continue my habit. Shallow, quicker breaths rather than deep breaths that will overwork my constricted vessels. I know how far I can bike or run before it starts to hurt. I know what I can and cannot accomplish to lead a full happy life until the cancer gets me in other words.
Step 3. Tailgating
I don't really have any other unhealthy habits. Not that I eat right, but I don't eat wrong. Not that I exercise regularly but I do stay active. My blood pressure has always shown up on the high side of normal. My cholesterol levels have always shown good, or when they haven't, have been easily adjusted by diet. I know when my body is behaving and when it isn't. I am rarely sick and when I do get the cold, once a year, it does not hang on.
Step 4. Opening pitch
It was close to a year ago when I really believed I was having a heart attack at work. Chest pains followed by the sore arm. It lasted more than a few minutes. I try to use the stairs instead of the elevators and that day I figured I pushed myself a bit too far. Maybe once or twice since then the feeling returned. Not having health insurance limits the amount of confirmation I am willing to go through, but I was pretty sure, at least until the pain went away, that it was some sort of heart attack. It was not an unbearable pain, and it lasted less than twenty minutes each time. It was since that time that I lost a decent amount of extra weight and rode my bike much more often.
Step 5. Number nine tee box
We moved into a house at the beginning of this month. Move a few pieces of furniture, have a cigarette, move a few more boxes, have another cigarette. yeah I remember a chest pain at that point. I still figured it was the lungs, not the heart. This past Friday, cleaning the garden and emptying the last of the boxes after work, I had a real chest pain. The way it hurts, I figure it should be hard to breath, but it really wasn't. The pain is in the center of my chest,exactly as if someone threw a baseball there. I am paying attention to the pain, and thinking I should be short of breath, but the breathing was okay regardless. It left after a short while, like usual.
Step 6. Two-minute warning
Last Saturday and it is at least ninety degrees in the sun all afternoon. I spend a good hour in the yard trimming the bushes. Light one more cigarette and come back in the house. Connor is with us and we plan to go to the library while Kristi goes to the After Five meeting. The pain comes on strong again, right in the center of the chest. I sit down, I pace, I have my head down between my legs, nothing helps. I take a warm shower, thinking it will clear the breathing, but, just as before, I seem to be breathing fine, short breaths or deep breaths. The pain is in the center of the chest but not, apparently, in the lungs. After a half hour I decide it's time to go to the hospital. And I manage to maintain my composure while getting Connor dressed and letting Kristi dry off from her shower. i am okay during the drive there and up until the point she drops me off and the emergency entrance while she and Connor find a place to park.
Step 7. Finish line
By the time Connor and she come in the hospital I am already through triage and back in the cardiac ICU room with a hundred eighty something blood pressure and an unbelievable amount of pain. The EKG shows normal and they unhook it. A few minutes later and the monitors are going nuts as my BP and heart rate are again going haywire. They had fed me some pills, and a nitro patch on my chest, but they finally injected some sort of blood pressure medicine into the IV tube and I found instant relief. It was at that point I was ready to go home and not stay in the hospital. They of course talked me out of it. Connor came in to see me, heart monitoir wires and IV tube and oxygen tank all attached to me. Poor kid, but I needed to see him. He was in the back seat of the car when his daddy went into the building and, although scared, I did not want him wondering where or what they were doing to me.
Step 8. Locker room
They can tell if it's a heart attack by some rise in some enzyme level in the blood. I don't know what any of that means, but that enzyme level rose through the night and they said it was actual heart damage. They arranged to run a camera up an artery from the groin to the heart, to see what was in there and to proceed based on that finding. They told me I would likely be awake even though I would most likely be out of it in the brain due to the Valium. Couldn't eat or drink anything after midnight, and about 24 hours after entering the emergency room, I was finally on the table to have that heart cathater procedure done. I wish i had stayed awake and watched my blood vessels on the screen, but about ten seconds after receiving the Valium I was out until the procedure was over.
Step 9. Post-game interviews
The camera showed an artery that was not blocked but very narrow due to plaque build-up. So narrow, in fact, that they could not install stents. I guess, in theory, after my next heart attack, they can do surgery and cut away that artery, but that was not an option the doctors were giving me. Their advice (obviously) was to stop smoking. I learned sitting at home that the nicotine in cigarettes narrows the arteries and builds up that plaque as much as fatty foods do. It isn't just the lungs affected.
Step 10. Season ending injuries
Sitting at home now all this week, hopefully not for too much longer. I know, you think 'slow down, take your time'. But if you realized how boring it is sitting around here and how much more trouble I can cause myself moving furniture and doing yard work, it is less exercise being at work. And less stressful, earning money and not worrying about not paying rent in a month. I am on blood thinners and beta blockers and aspirin and blood pressure medicine and who knows what else. And I will supposedly need a regular doctor now, and to stay on some of these medicines and to watch the rest of my life. And this is not me. Sorry to say it, but in all likelihood within two months I will stop seeing the doctor and within three stop taking the medicine, and as long as I am done smoking by then, I really will not be too afraid of my health. And every few months for a while, maybe once a year later on, I will do blood work and check my lab results and make sure everything is where it should be. And I will be fine.
Hope so anyway! To those of you who expressed your love and concern, I thank you so much. Actually, there is nobody on here who wouldn't express such love and concern, but some of you I snuck all this under your radar and you did not realize I was sick. Somebody told me people were praying for me to get better, and I had that thought, that memory way back in the day, where some people, once upon a time, would not have cared one way or the other what happened to me. That was the way i was to you, and I am very glad, very grateful, that i am becoming a person worthy of your love and care.
Namaste
