This is a crappy picture, but you can see the scar I have and below the scar you can see the outline of the ICD. I have been thinking of having a hand tattoo artist do a tattoo of jumper cables on it. lol. My Dr. would laugh, Its his NP that keeps me in check. That woman has control of the situation! So she thinks lmfao!
So at this point in my story I have been home for a little while and am feeling quite depressed. I hate everyone and everything at this point and am wondering why I was chosen to live against the odds. From what I understand 96% of those with SCD, Sudden Cardiac Death, do not survive to find out they have it. But with an ICD the swing is 100% the other direction, 96% survive to live another day. Pretty impressive if you asked me. I have been suffering from what I call the Jello factor since I was about 17. That is the sensation that my heart is sitting there wiggling instead of beating. The sad part about that is it was like an intermittent problem with a car. You go in and get checked and they say nope you are fine. Then you go in and get checked again and very soon they are telling you that you are crazy because there is nothing wrong. When I was a Mail carrier, I had chest pains and was taken to the ER by ambulance. The ER Dr. studied me for hours, then asked if I had just quit smoking. I told him yes I had, and he said OK, so what you have is stress related withdrawals and you will need to take a few days off. Now get out of here and go get a cheese burger or a pack of smokes and you will be fine. So I left and my Dad Lynn came and took me home. From that point on I disregarded when I would have the problem.
So sitting at home trying to figure out what had gone wrong. What I was capable of doing and what I needed to change became more of an obsession. May as well have been smoking crack I think. Was always thinking about how life would turn out now, how I could change it or if I even could. My job was hazardous to me, so was my mind. My brain was boiling in overload from recent events, like the aliens from the movie Mars Attacks.
Damn! I have to get a hobby to calm my mind, teach me how to focus again. My fish are relaxing to an extent but since my episode I was not able to lose myself in their underwater world and just enjoy the serenity I would usually find while watching them. So I decide that I am going to build some bird houses. I build a prototype that comes out pretty well. And I decide that I will make these for family for Christmas presents. I have no money so I am using fence pickets I had left over, and making rustic bird houses out of them. The object here is the wood will age rapidly and allow the look of an old abandoned cabin. I thought that would be pretty cool. I have my wife paint some signs for them. Home Tweet Home, Etc. They are adorable! Well I think so.
The whole time that I am trying to get my mind screwed back on straight. I am realizing my episode has taken its toll on my family as well. My youngest boy was just about potty trained but with dad gone for a week, and visiting him in the hospital had set him back and he was having accidents. I could see in my wife and children's eyes that they had a lot of uncertainty about what the future holds. The best thing that building the bird houses did for me, was to allow me to calm my mind enough to see what had happened to my family over this, that only time could heal. All the information on the internet that they had looked at was negative and depressing. Talk about a sobering experience to add to a sobering experience. All I could do for them was joke about how I had vapor locked. I still talk about it often, and I may for the rest of my life. I figure one of the best ways to ease the effects on my family is to talk about it until they are sick to death of hearing it. My youngest comes up and feels dads box every day now, to make sure its working right. He has accepted it as part of his Dad.
Its at about this time where the pain in my chest is very apparent to me. I am having night mares in my short sleep spells about it going off and shocking me. My Dr. has taken me off the Ameodorone, and I was taking Metoprolol twice a day. my heart rate is steady at 90 bpm resting rate. And I have been walking 3 miles a day for a while now. Dr. says it will improve my resting heart rate before long. I used to be a 60 to 64 bpm resting and light activity heart rate guy. In the Middle of the night I jerk myself awake, and wonder while I lay here in the dark as if I had just been shocked. It makes me panic and increases my night sweats dramatically. I am watching infomercials / paid programming on TV because nothing else is on. The bogey man also lives under my water bed at this point so there is no chance I am gonna go put on a movie in the dark. He is waiting with a cattle prod under the bed and he is gonna jump out and stick it on my chest and laugh at me. I wind up buying Eggies and the Shark Navigator vacuum. Eggies suck, but the Shark is Bad Ass! I feel like Opus from the old Bloom County comic strip. Crap! I really have no money now.
So about every hour I have a night mare and wake up with all my muscles jerking at the same time. I am addicted to infomercials because I am not willing to let the bogey man have his way with me. I accidentally put my left arm behind my back, a huge no no at this stage in my recovery. I have constant pain in my chest at this point and my mind says I am not long for this world. I cant drive for 6 months, and I have upcoming Dr. appointments. I knew my Dad Lynn was taking care of my mom, so I cant call and ask him to take me to the Doc. My father in-law Ed is out of town that week and my wife has some school stuff happening. So I call my Dad Glen, knowing the couple hours in the car are going to be pretty rough on him, but he didn't hesitate or complain at all. I am fortunate I have a lot of people who care about me! The Dr. says the pain in my chest is because the device sits on top of a bunch of nerves in my chest, and it is likely I will need to have a neural surgeon disconnect the nerves. Yes! More good news! I will be allowed to go back to work, but they wont give a list of restrictions for it would certainly jeopardize my job. So I take what I can get, and head back to work on a 40 hour maximum work week. Crap! I still cant drive, it has only been 6 weeks at this point.
Keep Coming back, There is a lot more to tell.
Please leave comments if you have questions, experiences you can share. You can be sure you will remain anonymous.
Thank You to my entire family!
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