talking about

Lying behind curtain #6, I hear two people talking across my body, junior reporting to senior: “At time of triage, BP 197/109, heart rate 97, respiration 18 … EKG showed less than 0.5 ST depression in V4 through V6 … two week history of CCS class 3 angina symptoms and one episode of class 4 associated with transient ST depression on EKG … risk score is 3 confirming a 5% two week risk of death or MI … bla bla; suggest left heart catheterization, admission, etc.,  etc. … It was a pleasure being involved in the care of this pleasant patient.”

This pleasant patient? Who are they talking about? One of them turns to me and translates. Simple language: not to worry, you’ve come to the right place.

Right now, three weeks later to the day, I’m alone with it all. I take the 9 medications mornings and at night, explore new ways to shop, cook, and eat, walk 3 times a day, and where are those old yoga pants for the rehabilitation program starting on Friday?

I experience occasional chest pain — like long spider legs crawling across my chest — reminiscent of that which made me go to emergency in the first place. Unsure of whether to call 9-1-1 or squirt nitroglycerin under the tongue and see what happens. Social contacts have become a blend of support and obligation. Many emails, cards, visits, meals at the door. How sweet, yet I wish to be alone, not having to explain or answer the well-intentioned “How are you?”

Because I don’t know, don’t have the words.

“Too many [ill persons] believe they cannot talk about their illness,” writes Arthur Frank*, reflecting on his own heart attack and subsequent cancer journey. “By talk about their illness, I do not mean explanations of their diagnoses and treatment. What most ill persons say about illness comes from … medical staff, not from themselves. The ill person as patient is simply repeating what has been said elsewhere – boring second-hand medical talk.”

I’ve even looked up terms other than heart attack to describe what happened to me, to make it sound more clinical and distant at the same time. Myocardial infarction (MI) and acute myocardial infarction (AMI) sound good, but I can’t get myself to say them. I resist their abstract quality, sensing the need to enter into experience itself.

“Critical illness leaves no aspect of life untouched,” Frank continues, “The hospitals and other special places we have constructed … have created the illusion that by sealing off the ill person from those who are healthy, we can also seal off the illness in that ill person’s life. This illusion is dangerous. Your relationships, your work, your sense of who you are and who you might become, your sense of what life is and ought to be – these all change, and the change is terrifying.”

With Frank — and inspired by the brave people I’ve met over the last five years in cancer and hospice settings — I write these posts, to witness and befriend this illness.

* Frank, Arthur, W. (1991). At the will of the body: reflections on illness. Houghton Mifflin Company, p. 4-5. Frank is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Calgary. Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myocardial_infarction