I am not someone who has big expectations in life (I didn’t even buy a lottery ticket for the recent $70 million Lotto Max draw), and I have always been content to just move along doing what I do, living how I live. Certainly, I’ve had some major disappointments in life, and I’ve had to let go of many goals and dreams, but I think the same could be said for most (if not all) of us lucky enough to hit our 40s and beyond.

Around the end of 2018 as I was puttering along, minding my own business, I was kicked right in the face by fate and then by climate change, which forced me to take a major pause in my life for which I was completely unprepared. In December 2018, about a week before Christmas, I had started to feel very tired and quite breathless doing really mundane things like walking up the stairs at home, or carrying a small bag of groceries from the store to the car. Because I’m such a good nurse, I diagnosed myself and explained these symptoms away with excuses such as, “I’m getting old”, or “wow, I’m so out of shape”, or “I need more sleep”.

Eventually, I felt bad enough to go see my family doctor, which I think broke some kind of unwritten “nurses’ rule of conduct” that says nurses administer health care, we don’t seek it out (amiright, nurses?). What finally forced me to swallow my pride and make the call to his office was the fact that I was at work, sweating profusely, heart pounding, and becoming breathless just by speaking with patients. Speaking! Stubborn as I was though, I could no longer deny that this was totally abnormal, and that I really couldn’t just chalk this up to being “out of shape”.

As I was trying to find the courage to call my doctor and admit weakness / ask for a help, I thought of something bizarre: for the last several days, I had been seeing headlines and articles in the news, on my iPhone, seemingly everywhere, that the latest research showed that women expressed symptoms of cardiac illness in ways very different than did men. Now, with my sweaty breathlessness and racing heart, it seemed less like a coincidence and more like a sign from God that I had been reading these articles for days!

My doctor saw me that day, took my pulse, and sent me to the hospital which was one block away, to be seen for what we hoped was a cardiac arrhythmia. An initial ECG revealed ST-elevations, which unfortunately I knew was a sign of a possible heart attack. A heart attack. Me, who has never smoked, who has a normal cholesterol profile, and who has no family history of cardiac problems was being managed by the (very efficient and wonderful) doctors and nurses at The Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus emergency department as a cardiac patient who has had a heart attack.

David was there with me, because he is a kind and supportive husband, and I apparently repaid his loving, kind support by embarrassing him with my refusal to believe the cardiologists who were trying to help me. As I lay on the stretcher, surrounded by many (so many) doctors, residents, medical students, and nurses, I suddenly felt enraged. What did they mean, I was having an MI? Every single time they asked, “how is your chest pain?”, I replied truthfully, “I do not have chest pain, I just can’t breathe“. I said it defiantly, as though this was a better, more normal, less alarming symptom than chest pain. I frowned, shook my head, got angrier and angrier by the second, and was feeling increasingly more embarrassed that so many people were fussing so much over me.

After another ECG, plenty of blood work, a bedside echo, and a million consults between 2 million doctors, one of the cardiologists at last strode up to my bedside and calmly but firmly declared, “you are having a STEMI, we need to take you to angio now”. I replied, “I don’t mean to be rude, but how can I possibly be having an MI when I have no risk factors?” An ST-elevation myocardial infarction was absolutely the last thing I thought I was suffering.

I think that was the point where D quietly begged God to crack open the floor and pull him under, because he was absolutely dying of embarrassment watching his crazy wife sassing the cardiologists with, as he later told me, “a tone that said ‘go back to medical school'”. This is not how I remember that moment, but honestly, if you read my “About” page on this blog, this is literally what I’m talking about. How do two people have completely different recollections of the exact same event?!

I was rapidly brought to the cath lab where they confirmed through my normal angio results that I was not having a heart attack. Oh, how smug I felt, even in a mild Ativan-induced fog. I’m pretty sure I smirked when the doctor leaned over me after he completed my angio, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “your coronary arteries are perfectly clear”. Perfectly clear! Ha! I knew it! Spike the football!

Unfortunately though, I was showing all the other signs and symptoms of having had a heart attack, and I was having disturbing arrhythmias. As I was mentally getting dressed and preparing to go home, wondering what we would be having for dinner*, the porter arrived and started wheeling me and my stretcher to a hospital room. (*Oddly, I am always ready to eat, especially in the most stressful, hideous moments. I was absolutely ravenous at this moment, so I had very little fight left in me and instead was mentally going through the fridge at home).

 

 

I spent the next two weeks, over Christmas and New Year, as a reluctant guest of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, suffering from myocarditis. I have been a nurse for two decades, and I admit my ignorance in never having even heard of myocarditis until myocarditis came and introduced itself to me. It didn’t even bring popcorn, though (rude). Endocarditis and pericarditis, sure, but not myocarditis. This is an inflammation of the heart, the entire muscle, which prevents it from being able to pump normally. From this comes cascading down a whole host of horrors. Suffice it to say, I learned that my heart is, indeed, the boss of me.

As someone said to me, when a runner hurts their leg running, they have to stop running until their leg heals. But people with myocarditis can’t just stop their hearts pumping until the heart is better, obviously. All we could do was wait for my body to heal my actual broken heart, while I received plenty of supportive care, and minimized activity to allow my heart to rest. In other words, I did my best impression of a couch potato, except in a hospital bed, feeling sick, looking like hell, with no potato chips or pop or TV to keep me amused.

It was a very rough ride, and my time in hospital was marked with a few terrifying episodes where all I could do was let go of my need for control, trust the nurses and doctors who were healing me, and really get an up-close-and-personal reckoning of, and appreciation for, my Catholic faith.

There were many bright lights though, in the form of caring and kind nurses and doctors who looked after me, texts of encouragement and love from friends and relatives, and visits from colleagues and loved ones. I learned (among many things) that I am someone who wants absolute privacy and to be left alone when I am ill, and I am sad now to think of the friends and family who wanted to visit but that I asked not to do so. I stopped them from doing a kindness, a mitzvah, for me, and I will always regret that.

One of the reasons I was so anxious and upset about being so ill was that it affected my work life in a way nothing else ever has. I could not work for weeks afterwards, but in the long-term I also had to quit one of my jobs that I’ve held for nearly my entire career, because it involved working in geographically isolated places. It was hard to stop dead in my tracks and then to pivot like that. I only realized this about myself through this illness, but I am someone who likes tight control over as much of my life as possible. Getting sick with myocarditis forced me to be more flexible, and made me truly understand that we really don’t have control over most of what happens to us. I had to learn to accept things, to keep moving ahead despite trepidation and fear.

However, I am so lucky in that I do have a job here in Ottawa. My colleagues here were so very supportive, and did so much to boost my spirits while I was recovering in hospital and at home. By February of 2019, two months after first becoming ill, I was feeling well enough that I was in talks with colleagues about returning to work. Through incredible out-patient support from the Heart Institute, care and feeding from D, and cheerleading and friendship from my colleagues, I was feeling so ready to return to work!

However, climate change had something to say about that. Ottawa was experiencing weird cycles of unusually warm days followed by more typical cold, snowy days. The back and forth of warm and cold temps, and the thawing and freezing that accompanied them, made for plenty of ice on the ground as the snow would turn slushy, then rapidly freeze to solid blocks of ice. This seems to be happening more frequently now in our winters, which was not typical when I was a child. My childhood winters used to be reliably cold everyday, with a deep freeze somewhere in the middle of February, and with no rain or thaw until spring.

I went to get the mail at the community mailbox one afternoon, then slipped on all the ice near the mailbox, falling sideways and backwards on my left side with my arm awkwardly extended above my head. I managed to stand up, embarrassed and terrified of falling again, and made my way home. My left upper arm was screaming though, which was unusual. I grew up in Canada, and have slipped and fallen so many times over 40-something winters that I actually expect to fall down every year. I had also never seriously injured myself in a fall. I’ve injured my ego, yes, but never my body.

Again, being an excellent nurse, I ignored the screaming pain, took some Motrin, figured I’d feel better in a few minutes, then tried to lie down with a heating pad over my arm. The fact that I could not move my left arm at all should have been my second hint that something was wrong, but no, I decided it was just a little bit hurt and would be fine in a few minutes. But the pain did not seem to be subsiding at all, and I noticed that it only got better if I held my left wrist with my right hand, bending my left arm at the elbow…

We took another trip to emergency, this time for x-rays. There were so many people in the waiting room, and it looked as though many of us were there for orthopedic complaints. In fact, I started to feel pretty confident that I only had a sprain or tear as I watched patient after patient leaving the hospital, and over-hearing them telling their companions that nothing was broken. And once again, I was so focused on my stomach and what we would eat for dinner, that by the time the doctor was ready to see me, I’d already decided I had a torn rotator cuff and would be fine with some Tylenol and rest. What’s for dinner?

As I sat in the exam room clutching my left wrist (thinking this was a perfectly normal thing to do), with D dutifully standing by, the doctor came in, introduced himself, grimaced at me, and said, almost apologetically, “you have fractured your left humerus”. Once again, something in my brain would not allow me to absorb what the doctor was saying, and I just replied, “nooooo….no, my arm is not broken, no. I just got over myocarditis and am trying to go back to work in a couple of weeks. No.”.

No, kind sir, no. Just “no”. Except, yes, oh yes. Yes yes yes, my humerus was fractured, rendering my left shoulder useless. I was so stunned, that I had no words left. I also had no tears left, because I cried them all during my two week stay at the Heart Institute.

 

 

Just like that, in one moment, in one seemingly benign, low-speed, low-velocity fall, I snapped my arm and would not be able to move it for at least three months. There is no work that any nurse can do with the use of only one arm.

When we returned home from the emergency room, I started to feel angry again, and now helpless and hopeless, too. And angry. I said to D, “that’s it, I’m not doing this again next year. Winter keeps trying to kill me, so I refuse to stay here and put up with winter next year!”

Eventually, of course, I did heal from myocarditis and from a broken shoulder, but not before I had to spend a total of seven months at home, not working, unable to use one arm, and too weak and in constant pain to do much of anything but watch television. I felt sad more often than not, and was probably starting to slide into depression before spring arrived.

D and I joked about running off to the south of France every winter from now on, because I was convinced every winter would come for my remaining limbs and perhaps my hips, and also have another go at my heart. At some point, we decided to actually try and go away, for real, no kidding. We both needed a break after the stress and slapstick-comedy-like insanity of my illness and injury. While I was literally helpless and trying to heal, D had to pick up the slack and do everything except bathe and dress me. I just stank and got hairy and wore the same dirty clothes everyday. I’m kidding! As if I bothered getting dressed. He also continued to go to work as usual. As I said to him, “I collapsed, and you picked me up, threw me over your shoulder, and just kept going”.

So here we are, January 2020, a full year after myocarditis and almost a full year after a proximal humeral fracture. I returned to work with my amazing colleagues at Sandy Hill in the summer of 2019; my heart healed with lots of time and lots of outpatient care from the Heart Institute; and my broken shoulder healed with lots of time, outpatient care from the ortho department of TOH Civic, and some excellent teaching and exercises from a wonderful physiotherapist at TOH Riverside.

D and I are heading to France shortly to live in Nîmes for a few weeks in hopes of escaping a little bit of our winter. I just want to be somewhere where there is no snow or freezing rain or ice. How lucky we are that we have previously visited Nîmes, and loved it enough to return for a longer stay. How lucky we are that we are able to return at all.

 

 

Why France? I’ll talk about that in another post, because this one was so long that I doubt you’re even reading it anymore!

Thanks for reading.