WeatherSystems

Life I have always known is a very precious gift and sometimes we tend to drift away from reality. Human nature I guess. All it takes is a sudden life threatening event to bring it all home. Each day we wake up to a challenge of some sort. Yes, life is precious and until it stares at you in the face and you begin counting each heartbeat, the reality of intentions awaken the soul.

And so it was with me a week ago Monday on January 11, 2010. I had just arrived at work around 6:20 am and was just getting out of the car when my chest began to tighten up. I walked into my office turning my computer on as the pressure in my chest worsened and a severe pain in my left shoulder blade deepened with each breath I took. Something told me this was not good and remaining in control of my senses arrived ten minutes later in the ER room at Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital.

I will say when you walk into the ER holding your chest and bent slightly over stating, "I think I am having a heart attack" you certainly get immediate attention and hey, no waiting. In a minute of a minute or two I was lying on a bed with a myraid of wires and electrodes from my neck to my ankles and placing nitro tablets one each five minutes times three under my tongue. An IV was placed in my right arm. The doctor was in very quickly and said I may be having a heart attack. Life was quickly placed in a box with four sides without windows and doors. The nitro did not ease the pain so a dose of morphine was injected into the IV. Within a minute or two the severe pain in the shoulder blade and the pressure in my chest eased off. Never had morphine before, not bad at least I was more comfortable. Many vials of blood were taken and the doctor came back and said I was going to be admitted.  Wow! What a role change for me, it was I who usually took others to the hospital, my wife, my kids, my parents.

I had a very nice room on the sixth floor cardiac ward and received excellent care. Was able to write my newspaper column later in the day from my bed. Blood work came back great, enzymes showed no heart attack.  All of a sudden my inner room of life had windows with blinds wide open but still unable to see  a doorway out. I was scheduled for a stress test the next morning. A  long night in a strange room it was.

The stress test while hooked up with more electrical circuitry, was actually a piece of cake running ten miles an hour at a 15 percent incline, ha! Then dye injected and nuclear imagining. Back to my room where a doctor came in and told me the imaging showed decreased flow in my left coronary artery on my heart. My eyes closed, the blinds and windows in my life disappeared and I was back staring at four blank walls.

Two hours later a cardiologist came by and said he thought the test may be a false positive and would require an angiogram to determine. Ah, another lonely night in the hospital. Wednesday morning the doctor came in and discussed the 'procedure' with me.
The procedure went well not bad at all, they relaxed me but I was able to see my heart on the monitors with the wire running through my arteries.

The doctor told me right away that my arteries were wide open and no plaque buildup at all and that I had a heart of a 40 year old. Hooray, but I thought I was already 40 years old (that's another story).

Even though I was in the basement in a dark room the sun was shining once again and all I could see were open doors. Back to my room for six hours of rest and then made the trek homeward. They think I had an esophageal spasm so a referral to a GI doc is in the works.

Being a weatherman it was like the weather around us, dark and rainy one moment and sunny and blue skies the next. We take that for granted quite often as well. The things I thought that were important were not, the things I sometimes do not think about were. Life is a precious commodity and time is a gift, that is why they call it the present.

I will be editing my 'bucket list' of things to do before I move on to a better place. What will you do?