by Jon Biddle
So Saturday morning around 4pm, I woke with a dream of a lizard dropping onto my shoulder – One of my greatest fears. I woke in the haze of sleep. I struggled to make sense of what was going on, my heart racing. In fact, it was pumping so hard in my chest I grabbed my Apple Watch and slipped it on. Through bleary eyes I could just make out the words fast arterial fibrillation.
Shit.
let me explain, arterial fibrillation (AF) comes in a variety of rhythms, at any point, AF flips to either SVT or VF. What they mean isn’t important, but that normally means a one-way ticket to the morgue.
I woke Sam, telling her to call 999. I was in trouble. I could feel that overriding sense of doom people talk about – you have that because the body needs adrenaline and quick. The sense of doom is the fight-or-flight system flooding your heart with adrenaline to make it beat faster. Jesus, right now, it didn’t need to beat faster. The next ECG I took, the rate was touching 200 beats a minute. The maximum heart rate of a man my age is 220.
It took over an hour and a half for the ambulance to arrive at the house.
My heart was still getting faster, 205 beats a minute. Sam was struggling. I found trying to manage her was more important than allowing my own fears to cloud my judgment. I got her to get William up next door and run over to primary school and grab the AED and bring it to the house. At least the AED would be in place if the rhythm slipped into VT. Statistically, the shock and CPR would save my life.
The ambulance crew arrived and hooked me up, confirmed – fast AF, or as doctors like to call; paroxysmal arterial fibrillation, which is a posh terminology for fuck knows.
The ambulance ride was making feel even more wretched. But thankfully slipping the other way, in to the green zone of sinus rhythm, which was encouraging.
Arriving at ED, they had clearly been busy. The staff looked exhausted. Stuck in a cubicle without continuous monitoring was a little unnerving. Placing the blood pressure cuff around my arm, oxygen saturation probe on my finger, utilising the ECG leads placed on by the paramedics, I placed on the three lead ECG. My rate was sinus, but still 130 beats a minute.
It was another hour before I got to see anyone; a little dumpy woman, yawning like a cow in my face, a little confused why I was already hooked up to the monitor.
“Who did this?” She demanded, more to herself than to me, I think. I was going to go through the ‘I work here, upstairs in the surgical division,’ but something was telling me she didn’t give a shit and frankly, nor could I so I shrugged.
Unconcerned by the raging tachycardia of my heart rate, she was happy that my blood pressure was 118/82. I was actually very impressed myself. I pointed to the heart rate. She shrugged and carried on writing her things down.
It’s quite a revelation when you, yourself, are now on the other side of the acutely ill spectrum. I often wonder what people are feeling emotionally when horrible things happen to them. I was curious to listen to the benign conversations of my fellow healthcare workers and, true to my suspicions, they had had a tough night.
Currently, there was a dog running around the hospital which was occupying the hospital security staff. They knew this because they needed the hospital security staff – a patient had stripped naked, smeared themselves in alcohol hand gel, borrowed a lighter from another patient and set himself on fire. The patient who had leant the lighter was now kicking off because it was now missing. The unconscious body of the patient still smouldering after being extinguished by a fire extinguisher was not enough to stop the violent outburst I could hear from my cubicle. It was then, when another naked man walked nonchalantly past my cubicle, poking his head through the door a grinning at me like Jack Torrance played by the psychotic Jack Nicholson in Stephen King The Shining.
Still slipping in and out of fast AF and sinus rhythm, I wasn’t sure if my fight-or-flight system was working strong enough to fight this lunatic off. He was suitably startled and made a run for it when we both heard “oi, there he is,” followed by a pounding of boots.
Sitting quietly, I heard my name mentioned. It was one of the ICU consultants who had come down to check on me. Word had got around I was in ED.
“Why is a 51-year-old obese man not on continuous monitoring?” The familiar voice said.
My thoughts exactly, although obese? Really?
They promptly moved me. “Ignore the naked man standing in the corner,” the ED nurse said as they wheeled me into another part of ED. The part where people come to die. I glanced up, thinking it was the same naked man who had poked his head through my door thirty minutes earlier, it wasn’t.
“What is it with naked men?” I asked.
“You have no idea!” was the reply.
The day wore on, with a change of scenery, I sat behind a similar worn our blue curtain in acute medical unit abbreviated AMU. As I was wheeled there I wondered why they hadn’t called something colourful like Gladioli or Daffodil ward, or at the risk of being insensitive but lighthearted to the plight of the many who cycle through AMU, I thought Beatz, with a Z, thinking this might be cool. Was I becoming dillierous, chuckling to myself? AMU is a soulless place in the bowels of the hospital where no one goes and where the grim reaper sits feebly disguised at the nurses station as a ward clerk. Her stern face would have been more fitting at the entrance to the Gulag Archipelago – trundling past her extended arm with three fingers jutting out toward bed three, no words needed, I guess, bed three was where they wuld park me.
The ward was a fluorescent lit dungeon, a hopeless attempt to keep the dying from actually dying, and the newbie docters strut around as if they are infact now a consultant.
“What happened?” – “my heart woke me, trying to escape through my neck.”
“How did this happen? Have you taken anything? Had sex?” – “erm, I dunno (shrugging) apart from fish and chips, nothing else, and yes, mind your own business about the sex.”
“Why did it happen?” – “I refer to your five years at medical school.”
“How do you feel” -“right now, hungry, a bit tired and worried about the massing of Chinese military that’s potentially threatening the Western world.”
“I mean, how do you feel because of your heart?” – shrugging “fine,” and gutted we would not be going to Dog fest (that would be a good blog post) We probably won’t be having a conversation about the Chinese military.
“Was you sweaty?” – “only when I was post coital, and did you not learn how to speak proper English at school.”
“I meant, we’re you sweaty while you was in AF?” – eyes searching for the answer on the ceiling a dried out tea bag stuck to the polystyrene ceiling tiles. How long has that been there? I wondered?
“Mr Biddle?”
The curtness of this doctor who was still in his dad’s bag when I started at the hospital all them years ago. My eyes kind of ignored the doctor stood at the end of the bed. They wandered to bed one, bed six, bed eight, bed ten, bed eleven, the patient toilet, the outside communal area. Each bed space or place had events burned into my conscious. I remember the faces, some names and the distraught relatives who watched while I failed to save them from one of thing that binds every single one of us…
I reflected on those nights, always the night when the reaper comes for them.
“Mr Biddle?”
I answered, trying not to be cocky, I told him I was diagnosed in 2016 with Sarcoidosis, was almost blinded with uveitis, rib fractures from a collision with a car while on my bike, diabetes, blocked kidney, suicide ideation and complex-PTSD. These things returning to haunt me in an exquisite torture while rattling them off. I am prime for a cardiac event. I am fat, have diabetes, work a stressful job and the only saving grace? I don’t drink or smoke. YAY for me.
So how long do actually have? I thought, this fresh faced doctor on a mission to cure cancer was only interested in the facts, something that medicine fails all the time. They cannot address the person scared inside, frightened of dying, frightened of leaving his family, leaving my beautiful wife behind. It was here that for years I felt unworthy through systematic abuse as a child, but in the cold light of day, facing something that would not happen this day, thankfully.
I felt worthy, I felt the urge to live.
The clarity of this moment caused a swell in me – My children rallied, my wife, blind with rage gave me both barrels about how much she loves me, and that I am worthy, I am worth fighting for and I should fight back to and not give in.
They (doctors) suspected caffeine had been the adjunct that had cause to the fibrillation. CAFFEINE – are you fucking kidding me!
The young doctor had left me with my thoughts, my eyes checked the surroundings, bed one was an old chap trying to pull his catheter out, next to him was a man with one arm outstretch with a god awful, permanent groan, next to him was a dude in some sort of psychological trip talking to an invisible butterfly – oh to walk a mile in that beautiful mind and next to me was Errol, with a malfunctioning internal defibrillator, on the minute, every minute, shocking him back to life; bless him.
“yes, bed three, patient name is John Biddle, his medical history is as follows – sarcoidosis diagnosis when he was sixteen…
My eyes roll, I told him three bloody times. As I listen to him on the phone to his master I wonder how many other mistakes he would pass along today.
A healthcare assistant broke my trance, pushing a beverage trolley, “Hello John, how about a nice cup of coffee.”
Fuck my life!
