The returning runner

Act 26 – “You’ve asked me that at least 300 times…”

My eyes opened. Everything seemed white. My wife was there and a couple of doctors. I was in a hospital. “How in the heck did I get there?”, I asked. Crazily my first thought was that there had been some sort of nuclear attack, and I had survived but was just awakening from a coma of several months. My wife replied, “You’ve asked me that at least 300 times, so I wrote it down for you.”  She handed me a full-page detailed transcript of the events. I had collapsed in the night – falling like a tree while walking toward the bathroom so hard it had awakened her. Paramedics had transported me to the hospital. I got to the end of the page, and, I almost asked her one more time; “What happened to me? How did I get here?”. Almost…but I didn’t want to ask 301 times…

For several days, I had no recollection of the events of that night but slowly it came back to me. I had suffered from bouts of pericarditis since my late teens and had several in the preceding months. The symptoms parroted a heart attack. I had learned to just suffer through rather than go in for a round of anti-inflammatories which provided some relief.  That night was the worst. All the classic heart attack symptoms – crushing pain in the chest, pain radiating up my jaw, pain down my left arm. Somehow, I thought making my way to the bathroom and splashing water on my face would be a good idea. I set up. Crushing pain caused me to moan involuntarily. Not content with that, I proceeded to get up and take a couple of steps. A sledgehammer hit me in the chest. I new I was losing consciousness – and fast! On the way down I thought; “Well, I should hit hard enough to wake my wife.” My next thought; “Bummer, usually CPR is ineffective.” Seriously, I had those two thoughts. My wife roused me a minute or two later but then I slipped again into unconsciousness.

The brain doc thought that I had a serious arrythmia and suffered from hypoxia. The heart doc didn’t think that I would have come out of serious arrythmia on my own. I think the brain doc was right – my heart had either flat-lined or come very close to it and the impact from the landing had got things going again. My theory anyway… I did have some brain effects which I never told the docs about. Hey, when you want to get the go-ahead to drive again you may not be thinking straight. Starting a month later and continuing for another four or five months, I had frequent freeze-frame vision when running. On the worst occasion, I was going 20-30 yards on a trail without getting a new image. When the little guy running the projector got so crossed up that he started substituting images from a dream the night before, I decided I should probably start walking. Oh, and my wife crushed me in trivial pursuit for those same four or five months – hadn’t to have been some serious hypoxia effects. The only explanation…

I’m convinced that robust cardio-pulmonary conditioning saved my life that night. What I didn’t know was that a cure for pericarditis had been discovered in the decades since my teens. I haven’t had a pericarditis attack in the 12 years since receiving that cure.

Photo: My 2012 EKG