PART TWO (May 26, 2011)
My wife, Ana, experienced a rapid heart beat last Saturday. It lasted for a good part of the morning and into the afternoon. Her visit to the emergency room that evening included various tests. All but one were negative. She had a very high concentration of a specific enzyme that indicates the heart was severely stressed within the last 24 hours, meaning there could possibly be significant damage to the heart muscle. That set off all kinds of alarms in the ER. She was admitted later that night. She is out of the hospital now and has various appointments and tests lined up with a cardiologist. As of today, there does not appear to have been any permanent damage to her heart, nor does it appear that she had a heart attack. We're grateful for that, but the tests will continue as there are some lingering problems.
This racing heart thing isn't new for her, but it's been dismissed in the past by doctors who were baffled by it and concluded it was nothing serious. I believe everyone, including us, figured it had something to do with stress. Each episode usually came about during high-anxiety times but went away within minutes of striking. Then came last Saturday. The racing heart led to breathing problems, dizziness and other troublesome reactions. The stress level of the previous few weeks leading up to that day was off the charts. In hindsight, this attack was not a surprise. As the doctors told us, extreme fatigue and chronic worrying does all kinds of destructive things to the body.
Like most folks, we've had a lot of anxiety for at least three years. A lot of it relates to the toll the recession has taken on our lives. At 50something, the body does not deal with the stress or anxiety in the resilient manner it did at 20something. So if this turns out to be stress related -- and it very well could because Ana is an otherwise very healthy woman -- it will be time to make some internal and external changes in our world, which include distancing ourselves from toxic situations and people, and processing better what we can't filter out. There is good stress and there is bad stress, and right now we have too much of the latter. We bite the bullet in order to survive day to day, but that strategy may have to be altered.
Getting sick is one of the forgotten byproducts of the recession. You mostly read about savings accounts having been depleted, careers being destroyed and homes falling into foreclosure. Unfortunately, all of these things take a toll on the mind and body. So first comes the economic collapse, then comes the physical and personal problems that we are all prone to.
In a way, we are hoping this was caused mostly by stress and that no further invasive procedures or potent medications are necessary. We can rearrange our lives -- make various sacrifices in order to alleviate some of the pressure -- but we can't turn back the clock to better times when her job was manageable and my career helped us save for the future. I would rather deal with the risk and challenge of creating a less pressure-filled life than for either of us to end up on an operating table. We need to change the lens in which we view ourselves and our situation -- control what we can control -- and live more in the moment. And we need to somehow do all of that without putting more pressure on ourselves in a year that has already included Ana being a donor for her leukemia-stricken brother and the sudden death of my daughter's 16-year-old sibling.
