Heart Attack! Didn't I Tell You?

Chapter One - The Phone Call

Note to the reader:  I'm asking myself why I'm sharing something so personal and intimate about our family, and I guess there are two reasons.  #1.  It could be beneficial to you or someone you love:  perhaps you can learn from our mistakes.  #2.  Perhaps I can learn from our mistakes.

Sometimes you get hit hard, right in the gut, and your response is and can only be... a gasp for air. 

It wasn't me who had the heart attack, but my husband.  At age 62, he seemed the picture of health:  one without a family history of heart disease, and a man who loves to golf and play tennis.  That's what he did the eve of his heart attack:  play tennis.  The day before, he played several rounds of golf, and had chest pains afterwards.  The pain subsided after a few hours, so the next day, he pretended that nothing was wrong.  He played tennis for an hour, and then quit. 

He came home with pain, and stayed awake with pain all night until 5:00 a.m. the next morning, Thursday, January 6, 2011.  Then he drove himself to the emergency room which is about fifteen minutes away.  The medical people easily recognized the symptoms and asked him which family members they should call.  He said, "No one.... don't bother them.  My wife's out of town."  I was.  It was true.  I was two hours away in Oklahoma with my mother, caring for her, but that was no reason to not call me. 

The nurses and doctors pushed further, "Mr. Hodges, you are having a heart attack right now, and you have been having one for some time.  We're taking you up to the Cath Lab immediately.  We need to call your family and let them know.  "Who can we call?"  Still, he stubbornly said, "No.... don't bother them."

What on earth was he thinking???  The man was having a heart attack, and he wouldn't let his family know about it!

Communication in our marriage, all thirty-eight years, has always been an issue.  I give too much info, or at least I used to, and he gives too little.  He has never been much for conversation.  Over the course of time, my conversations and sentences have shortened because I can tell when he's on overload and received too much information.  You know how we women are, we can tell when we are being "tuned out", and you know how men are:  they think we just ramble.  So, sometime or somewhere, I just sort of quit trying.  I felt that having to pull and prod him just to gather information was a waste of energy.  I don't know what he felt... perhaps he felt that I was intrusive.  Perhaps he just didn't want me to know more than he offered.  Perhaps he felt I already knew what I needed to know... perhaps. 

Or perhaps he was trying to protect me.  Our last fifteen months dealing with my mother's health issues had stretched us beyond all boundaries of normalcy.  We were exhausted mentally, physically and emotionally, plus we were still trying to figure out the next part of her life:  ours, too.  We had lived away from home and away from each other more in that time period than we had ever done so, and thousands of those hours were spent at hospitals and other medical care facilities with Mama.  Perhaps he was still in denial that the heart attack was really happening, and that this time HE was the patient, and I, once again, the caregiver.

I don't know what he was thinking.  Our son doesn't know, either.  He was just ten minutes away and could have, would have driven his dad to the ER, or would have called 911.  Our son is just as bewildered as I about his dad's silence.

The cardiologist found one artery 95% clogged and inserted one stent.  The other arteries were only mildly blocked and required no stents, thank goodness.  Once stable, my husband was rolled down to his room in CC (Cardiac Care).  Soon upon his arrival, his heart rhythms were so out of sync, that the cardiac team had to shock his heart and then perform CPR:  otherwise, Code Blue.

That's when his nurse became emphatic, "Mr. Hodges... we have to call someone!  Let me call your wife or your son!"  My husband, annoyed from being awakened from such "good sleep" as he called it, just wanted to go back to sleep.  So, he agreed and gave her permission to call.  She did immediately!

About 10:30  that Thursday morning I received a phone call from a very persuasive woman claiming to be a cardiac nurse, and that my husband had just had a heart attack!  She continued telling me that they had to do CPR on him, and shock his heart, and that they were at that time taking him back up to the Cath Lab to see if they had missed anything!  She said that I needed to be there!  As she was hanging up the phone she said that she would then call our son to alert him.

With the sound of her voice reeling in my head, it never occurred to me to doubt the reality of this phone call.  Immediately I tried to figure out what I should do first.  There I was taking care of my mother who couldn't stay long by herself without assistance, but now I needed to be in Texas caring for my husband, my dearly beloved, hard-headed, hard-to-understand, stubborn husband who had just had a heart attack.  I needed to be and wanted to be with him, beside him...  whether he made it through this heart attack or... not. 

"Why, oh why hadn't I called him the night before?"  It had been two days since we had last talked.  Now it didn't make any sense at all that we hadn't phoned each other, but earlier I had felt that if he wanted to talk or had something to say, he would have called me.   "Why, oh, why hadn't I called him just to check on him?  All I had to do was pick up the phone ."  "Why's?, "Why not's?", and "What now's?"  kept flooding my mind.

I felt like I had been punched in the gut... hard... really, really hard.


(to be continued...)



@Copyright 2010, Cindy Lou Hodges All Rights Reserved.