Happy Re-Birthday to me!
A year ago today, I died while at work. I really wasn’t aware of it at the time; I just knew that something wasn’t right. It had been a hot week and I was really feeling the heat. I had been slowly trying to get myself in better shape since I had quit construction and started working at Whole Foods a year and a half before. I had dropped from 325+ lbs to around 265, so I felt pretty good about that, little did I know how far I had yet to go, I was about to get a major dose of motivation. As part of trying to live a healthier lifestyle, I had started to ride my bike to work. On average it was about a 35-45 minute ride. The day before I had started off on my way to work, it was pretty hot and I was about a quarter-mile into my ride when I started to get a little light headed. Soon things went almost completely black and I had to get off and walk my bike. After I had walked for a few minutes my vision came back and I hopped back on my bike and started riding again. I did this repeatedly, ride 50 yards, walk100 yards, ride 50 yards, walk 100 yards. When after an hour, I wasn’t even half way to work; I began to see the futility of it. I called in to work and told them I was going home sick, and then I called for a ride home. When I got home I couldn’t stay awake no matter how hard I tried; I slept through till the next morning. The next day, attributing my spell of the day before to heat, and maybe a “bug” of some sort, I decided to not push things and drove my car to work. Things seemed okay for the first half-hour or so of my shift, and then things started to get a little haywire. I began to get a little dizzy, my vision started to swim around and I started to get holes in my sight, bottomless black areas where reality seemed not to exist. I told my supervisor and he told me to sit down for a few minutes and see if I felt any better. After sitting for a bit, I started to feel okay, so I got back on my register. After helping a couple customers, things started to go wrong again. I started to get tunnel vision; It felt like I was pulling back from myself, receding from my eyes. The scene through my eyes became two circles in a field of black, I felt as if I was looking out through them from a point several feet behind myself. I could see my hands sliding items over the scanner and tapping codes into the keypad but they seemed to be doing it on their own, I couldn’t feel them and they seemed to be moving without any input from me. I could hear the conversations between myself and the customers, but I was just an observer, the voices came as if through cheap speakers from a long ways off. The realization started to come to me that something was seriously wrong. It felt as if the world existed in a very separate place from where I was, oddly this realization didn’t cause me concern, I was more worried about making a mistake cashiering. After helping five or six customers I knew I could never make it for another seven hours, I had to get things checked out. I told my supervisor that I couldn’t go on any longer. He offered to drive me to my doctor, but after sitting for a few minutes I felt okay and insisted on driving myself. I got to my doctors office which was only about a mile from work. Once I told my doctor the symptoms I’d been having she gave me an ECG. As soon as she saw the printout she said that I needed to get to the ER immediately and offered to call me an ambulance. But being the idiot that I can sometimes be, I told her that I felt fine when I was sitting, and insisted on driving myself. So ECG printout in hand I drove off to the hospital.
I walked into the ER and handed them my printout and before I had a chance to sit down, or give them my name, or even give them my insurance information, I had someone next to me with a wheelchair. I was whisked back and into a bed while people were scrambling around sticking electrodes all over me, including a large patch, chest and back, defibrillators so they didn’t have to look for a crash cart if I flat-lined. Soon I had a group of doctors huddled around my heart monitor screen; there was much discussion amongst them with occasional puzzled outbursts. There was a constant parade of doctors through my room; it seemed as if everyone that worked at the hospital wanted to see what was going on with my monitor. I kept getting asked how I felt by doctors with confused looks on their faces, as I was laying down, I actually didn’t feel that bad. I found out later that my monitor was actually showing several different things. Without getting into too technical of an explanation, I was experiencing atrial fibrillation, and ventricular tachycardia, compounded by Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome which is a congenital condition whereby you have an extra nerve in you heart which sets up a kind of feedback loop allowing your heart to race virtually out of control. I found out later that my heart rate would get up to between 400 and 500 beats per minute, I would go into cardiac arrest, and then I would suddenly regain normal sinus rhythm. It kept doing this repeatedly and I was conscious the whole time. My cardiologist said later that he had never talked to someone with an ECG like mine before, because he had never seen someone conscious, if I hadn’t been awake and talking to them the whole time, there were several points where they would have zapped me with the defibrillator. He also told me that he had never seen anyone with the combination of things wrong with their heart that I had outside of an autopsy. To make a long story short, they managed to get things under control with the right combinations of drugs. I spent the next ten days in the hospital; I had two heart catheterizations, where they fish wires up into your heart through your femoral arteries. One was to remove the Wolff-Parkinson-White nerve; the other was to do an angiogram to check how clear my coronary arteries were. I’ve since had two more catheterizations to get rid of the causes of the atrial fibrillation.
I walked into the ER and handed them my printout and before I had a chance to sit down, or give them my name, or even give them my insurance information, I had someone next to me with a wheelchair. I was whisked back and into a bed while people were scrambling around sticking electrodes all over me, including a large patch, chest and back, defibrillators so they didn’t have to look for a crash cart if I flat-lined. Soon I had a group of doctors huddled around my heart monitor screen; there was much discussion amongst them with occasional puzzled outbursts. There was a constant parade of doctors through my room; it seemed as if everyone that worked at the hospital wanted to see what was going on with my monitor. I kept getting asked how I felt by doctors with confused looks on their faces, as I was laying down, I actually didn’t feel that bad. I found out later that my monitor was actually showing several different things. Without getting into too technical of an explanation, I was experiencing atrial fibrillation, and ventricular tachycardia, compounded by Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome which is a congenital condition whereby you have an extra nerve in you heart which sets up a kind of feedback loop allowing your heart to race virtually out of control. I found out later that my heart rate would get up to between 400 and 500 beats per minute, I would go into cardiac arrest, and then I would suddenly regain normal sinus rhythm. It kept doing this repeatedly and I was conscious the whole time. My cardiologist said later that he had never talked to someone with an ECG like mine before, because he had never seen someone conscious, if I hadn’t been awake and talking to them the whole time, there were several points where they would have zapped me with the defibrillator. He also told me that he had never seen anyone with the combination of things wrong with their heart that I had outside of an autopsy. To make a long story short, they managed to get things under control with the right combinations of drugs. I spent the next ten days in the hospital; I had two heart catheterizations, where they fish wires up into your heart through your femoral arteries. One was to remove the Wolff-Parkinson-White nerve; the other was to do an angiogram to check how clear my coronary arteries were. I’ve since had two more catheterizations to get rid of the causes of the atrial fibrillation.
To say that this was all a life changing experience would be kind of an understatement. The angiogram showed that only one of my coronary arteries had significant blockage. For my age and family history and my heavily carnivorous life style, I figured this wasn’t too bad, but it was time to make some changes. By the time I got out of the hospital gone were nicotine and caffeine from my life. I then started systematically changing my diet, slowly eliminating sugar and refined wheat, then meat, dairy products and oils. I started adding more vegetables, whole grains and fruit. Now one year later, I eat an almost completely vegan diet, I’m down under 170 pounds and my type 2 diabetes is gone. I’ve gone from extremely high cholesterol (over 300 total cholesterol) to readings that according to everything I’ve researched make me virtually heart attack proof (116 total, LDL 54). I used to take my lunch at work in my car because the break room was upstairs and it was too much for me to walk up them every day, now I spend at least 45 minutes on a Stairmaster every day and hike 12-20 miles at least once a week. There have been other changes. A year ago my sister and I had been estranged for a couple of years, many reasons, we both had things going on in our lives that caused us to lose touch and lose our way. She came to see me in the hospital and in the year since we have rebuilt our relationship and now we probably are closer than we have ever been. Most important is the change in perspective that I have gained. I have done a lot of thinking in the past year, about where I have been and where I am going. I am going to savor and make the most of my new lease on life. The future is coming and I’m liking the look of it!
Jim Stack- September 25, 2010
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