Mavis's Melting Pot

The Filling In The Sandwich Of Life

The Filling In The Sandwich Of Life

I love sandwiches of all kinds, but I always try to keep my choice on the right side of healthy. As a nurse it is often my only option for being able to eat during a hectic twelve and a half hour shift when priorities can constantly change.

Last July, to celebrate my sixtieth birthday, my husband treated me with so many surprises that I felt very special, very spoilt and very loved.

The holiday started simply with our flying to Philadelphia and then after picking up the hired car my husband drove me to a place called Bethlehem in Pennsylvannia where I attended my first ever poetry convention and met some wonderful people including the 'mysterious' Storymaster and Storymistress. It was an honour to meet so many talented writers and we had such fun.

It was with a little sadness that we said goodbye to our new found friends on the Sunday. As my husband drove us away I was both sorry to see such a fantastic time end and excited to be starting the rest of the holiday. Our plan was to drive across the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia following the Skyline Parkway, then the Blue Ridge Parkway and finally the Smokey Mountains and down to Nashville Tennessee.

We planned to stay at various locations for a couple of nights each time to enable us to explore and visit the many beauty spots. On the Tuesday after the convention my husband was in such discomfort with a urine infection that he had to go to a hospital emergency room. It resulted in him needing a catheter inserted. It wasn't pleasant but at least he could pee again! They drained 2 litres on insertion of the catheter and he nearly went into shock losing all that fluid in one go.

Luckily we were staying two nights at the Skyline motel and he rested for the whole of the first day and got used to having a little bag strapped to his leg. We even joked about how I couldn't bear to be away from a hospital for three and a half weeks and I had willed him to need treatment so I could visit one.

Later we decided to take a gentle walk down the mountain to see a waterfall. It was about 460 feet down to it and about an hour later I was standing taking photos of this natural beauty. What a sight with rainbows playing on the spray.

Knowing that it would take longer to climb back up and that it was already five o'clock in the evening we reluctantly started to leave. As I clambered down from the rocky perch from where I had been able to get the best view, I slipped a little and clung on to an overhanging branch. This saved me from falling but caused me to twist and jerked me to one side. Thanking my lucky stars that I had not fallen and injured myself 460 feet down the mountain, we again started to follow the track back to the top. About a hundred yards into the journey I felt a really sharp pain in my ribs, that took my breath away for a moment. I stopped and held my hand over where it was hurting. I did breathing control exercises and waited until the pain subsided. I then paced myself better and we both rested every 100yards or so. Finally reaching the top again, we walked slowly back to where we were staying. What a wonderful walk and having to slow down enabled me to absorb the beauty of the place.

The following day we drove out sight-seeing and had many walks to get better views of buildings. That night I went to sleep so happy and contented and thinking that I must be one of the luckiest people alive. I was with the person I love more than life itself and I still had nearly three weeks left of the holiday to enjoy.

I fell asleep so happy. I woke suddenly and had to run for the bathroom. I was very sick. I always think it is strange but when you wake like that, even though you are not really fully awake, you know immediately that you are about to throw up. I am glad that first time that I did not know this was to be repeated every twenty minutes all night.

By the morning the pain had moved from my stomach to the left side of my chest and I felt strange as if someone was squeezing me very tightly. My husband rang the hotel receptionist to see if there was a resident doctor and in a very short time there was a knock on the door. When opened there stood three paramedics with a stretcher. By then I did not care. I knew that I looked awful, when I had looked into the mirror in the glaring bright white light of the bathroom on my last visit there, a pair of frightened dark eyes in a grey-white face had looked back at me.

I was examined expertly by one of the paramedics and I heard him say to one of the others "I think that she is having a heart attack we must be quick." I remember saying, or trying to say "no you've got it wrong this is food poisoning I am sure this is from the prawns I had for lunch."

As I was wheeled on the stretcher across the foyer to the heavy glass doors, I closed my eyes to block out the sight of all the curious faces turned towards me. I think I thought if I couldn't see them then they couldn't see me. I must have looked a sight, by then I had a sick bag clutched in my right hand holding it under my chin and an oxygen mask clamped to my nose and mouth. The pain was excruciating in my chest. When I did open my eyes, I did start to feel scared as I saw the fear in my husband's eyes and he is never frightened. This experience was completely out of his sphere of coping strategies and he also looked a little lost and bewildered and helpless.

Going along in the ambulance two paramedics were with me in the back while the third drove. They were kind, professional but strangers. My husband followed behind in the car, at very high speed, I found out later!

Being blue-lighted through the mountain roads whilst having a size twenty cannula inserted into a vein in my arm is not something that was listed on my holiday itinary of things to do.

By the time I reached the emergency room I had a drip going into my arm and I had been sick one more time.
The funniest thing that I can remember from that trip one of the paramedics kept asking me which hospital I wanted them to take me to and kept listing the virtues of each. As I had only been in America for seven days I could not really answer...I didn't care which one...just get me there please.

I have never seen so many people around one stretcher. Someone was taking blood from my right arm and I was still trying to clutch the sick-bag. Another was syringinging medication into the cannula in my left arm and another was taking a recording of my heart and doing an echocardiogram. My husband had arrived but after a quick look-see to check on me, he was whisked off to reception to book me in, and I learned later, to hand over his gold credit card to them. This was the means by which we were paying all our bills as we holidayed. Keeping cash just for shopping.

The nightmare had started. They put twenty thousand dollars on the card. About the same time as this was happening I was being seen by a cardiologist who told me that the Troponin levels in my blood were high and that proved that I had suffered a heart attack. This he said was probably started two days before in that ravine, by the waterfall. Troponin is an enzyme which is only released into the blood by the heart muscle when experiencing a 'cardiac event' or a myocardial infarction (heart attack).

I was admitted to the ward where I remained wired to so many monitors, drips and alarms that even as an experienced trauma nursing sister I was impressed. I was given a cocktail of drugs and I finally slept. With all the morphine the pain in my chest was subsiding to a 2/10 from a screaming 20/10. I will never again ask a patient to give me a number between one and ten to describe the level of a pain. One million is more like it and you have this strong urge to hit the person asking you!

When I woke up it was the afternoon and my husband was sitting beside my bed holding my hand as if he never wanted to let it go.

The pain was bearable and I felt more in control so I decided to ring each of my children and let them know we were OK and what was happening. I was concerned that if they rang the hotel to see how their Mum and Dad were getting on with their intrepid journey across the mountains they would panic if they were told that their mother, who they consider 'slightly dotty' and nearly in her dotage, had been rushed to hospital in an ambulance with blue light flashing and sirens screaming.

It was the hardest thing I have ever done.

My husband rang my 22 year old daughter who lives with us in the UK. I lay there listening to his gentle voice explaining what had happened. Of course she then wanted to talk to me and I just did not know that as I took the phone I was going to have the strangest and hardest conversation with her that I have ever had, and there have been a few strange talks in the past. I put the phone to my ear and as I heard her voice I did the unthinkable, I burst into tears. It was about the worst thing I could have done as she has very rarely seen me cry. Usually at funerals and sad things on the news but never just cry.

I think everything just suddenly hit me, I also suddenly realised that I had experienced a heart attack, me, not quite sixty and other than being a severe migraine sufferer fairly fit, had just had a heart attack. I also knew, and why it came into my head at exactly that moment I don't know, that if you have one there is a high risk of you having another more serious, sometimes fatal one, in the next 24 to 48 hours.

Without thinking what I was going to say I told Amber, my daughter to listen to what I was going to say. I told her how much I loved her and how much she had brought into my life. How it was all the richer for her having been born. I told her how proud I was of her and how she was someone really special. I know that all mothers think of their children like this but it was suddenly very important to me that I said it and that she heard me say it. I ended by saying goodbye in case anything further happened and I didn't make it back to England. I said that she was not to think that we were wrong to have gone on this kind of travelling holiday but to remember that I was doing what I wanted, what I had dreamed of doing for a whole year, and was with the person I have loved from the first time I met him when I was seventeen.

Of course a few tears were shed by her and me at the end of my 'chat'. Thousands of miles apart, but at that moment I had never felt closer to her. I then rang each of my three sons they are 36, 35 and 33 years old, and repeated similar kinds of conversations. Similar but different as each one of them is special to me but their love-link takes a very individual path specific to each of our relationships. Their personalities and mine forever interweaving, evolving over the years and so very precious to me.

After I put the phone down at the finish of the final call I felt drained. What a day it had been. Earlier after a discussion with my consultant I had signed a do not resuscitate notice. This instructed the hospital that if my heart stopped and as a result my quality of life was likely to have been majorly impaired by the event and the subsequent revival, no one was to artificially restart my heart. Following this I had just said goodbye to each of my children.
What was next I wondered. This was soon answered by a knock on the door. It was time to eat.

It was evening and my supper was brought in on a tray. This lightened the atmosphere and my husband left to go and get some food for himself.

I had many new experiences over the next couple of days, and I'm sure I shall write about them some day,
but one sticks in my mind.

I write, no really! (sorry just my warped sense of humour)

I write songs in addition to my poems and the next day as I was having my isotope scans and stress tests, to take away the fear and in answer to questions asked, I mentioned this to the sstaff carrying out the procedures. I had just finished a particularly hard and strenuous test climbing a steep hill, simulated of course on a walking machine that was raised to a steep incline and I had to continue for two minutes. I had completed this and was sitting sipping water and the friendly staff were asking me why I was on holiday in that particular place and I told them about writing.com, the poetry convention, the wish to write poems and songs etc..

The next thing I realised they asked me to hum the tune to one of my songs. I'd just told them I don't write, read or play music but that the tunes just come into my head. You understand what I mean I know. Well I cannot hum to save my life. I sound like a constipated bee, if there is such a thing. Anyway to my horror I just opened my mouth and sang them a couple of verses of 'My Cherished Fallen Angel'. They were very kind and made all the right appreciative noises. As I left they said I was the most unusual patient they had ever had. That just about sums it up. Surreal but oh so very real.

Well to cut a long and probably tedious story short. I was released and as the Troponin levels were normal again, I was told that I could continue with my holiday. The rest of the travelling went well and Rod and I only had to see the inside of two more hospitals. He to have his catheter removed and me again blue-lighted to an emergency room with chest pains in the middle of the night a week after the first event. This time in the Smokey mountains at Gatlingburg Tennessee, the first was at Charlottesville in Virginia. I did not have to be admitted to a ward as they knew immediately what was wrong and gave me heart medication. Like an aftershock of an earthquake I was experiencing a severe angina attack.

Again we continued on our holiday. Now for the other slice of bread. What you say, if you have reached this far that is. Remember the title of this lengthy, but necessary for me blog? Exactly, so the first slice was the convention, hospital treatments the filling and then the end of the holiday in Nashville is the finishing crusty bread slice. And what a slice.

I visited a Honky Tonk bar called 'Legend's Corner' in Nashville's Broadway and there I got talking to the singer in his break and my husband without my knowledge asked him if he would play the demo CD of my friend singing 4 of my songs. He did and the crowd in there liked it. Wow, I've heard my songs on Broadway.

On the 9th August I kept an appointment with the Paramount Music Company and met a couple of producers and to my surprise and delight, then and there, two days before my sixtieth birthday I was offered a songwriter's contract with them.

I have not yet signed up with them. I will consider it again in the New Year. My health and that of my husband has caused life as I knew it to change radically and I even took a break from writing.com for a while! This blog has taken three months to complete. I don't know if songwriting is a priority now, although I know that writing will 'see me through'. It is cathartic and helps me to cope in this unpredictable world.

This completes this particular sandwich and the filling although not to my liking or choice has furnished me with much fuel for future scribblings

As my dear mum would have said "it all adds to the rich tapestry of life." And Mum for once I agree.

Thank you for reading. See you in another blog soon.