How to be after a Heart Attack - Part 4 / by Bridgit Lee

It is really strange walking around doing my normal stuff only 11 days after having an acute heart attack! I am lucky, I know I am lucky here. Not everyone gets out of their first heart attack like I have, can I say this kind of gives me the creeps? I want to add out loud to the Universe, “thank you, I am not bragging only sharing.” Everything feels different, not a lot but enough.

I was laying in the hospital in the middle of the first night, maybe a finger full of hours after being saved. Saved by a room full of competent people doing their job well. I was laying there thinking I had gotten exactly what I asked for on my way in. Exactly what I asked for help all the way to the hospital, it was a mantra in my head I kept repeating while Brad drove me to Kaiser. “You just need to get to Terra Linda, that’s it. Just get to Terra Linda and once you walk in, you can let go.” So I did that, I always go into a procedure knowing I am going to get exactly what I need. I cannot easily explain what all happened in the ER, it was my first time there for me. I have had 14 surgeries, so I have that strange comfort zone in a hospital. But once I took my top off and slipped into the gown, I was surrounded by at least 8 people or more. Someone at my head talking to me, telling me I was going to feel everyone touching me. He apologized about the IV’s and I told them I would be their best patient today and I could take whatever I had to. I remember saying that, I can’t write this without getting teared up. So much going on at once that I don’t remember what I was feeling.

What I really want to be sure and share is that my ER room was FULL of men, I was surrounded with young men all talking at each other. It was loud and at moments it seemed like background noise. They had trouble finding a pulse in my feet, they were blue. But then found it on the inside of my ankles, I think it is this pulse that saved me from having my chest cracked open. At some point I feel my hips being lifted up and my pants being pulled off me. I screamed “WAIT", everyone froze, it was a serious pause as I looked down and saw a woman! Again, more tears, I’ll be back -

I had just recently finished reading “Know my name” and was still raw around unwanted touch and rape. So when I looked down totally unconscious in some ways of what was pulling on me, she was a goddess and I can’t stop thinking about it. Thank you Kaiser for that, who ever, how ever, it was a safe place for me. Then Dr. Chen walks in and she is telling me that I am having a heart attack and that she believed I had been having it for a while!

Shit hits the fan in the ER, I have no idea how long I was in room 9 of the ER. But I remember noticing the slow roll into the Cath lab. I have never been on one of those air pressure lift things before and it had me on the other bed in seconds. Of course I was talking during the procedure, they need you awake. Wait for it, but I was talking too much, when the Dr. doing the procedure realized I was talking to him he asked “Are you talking to me?” I replied “yes I am” and that was that. I came awake to a nurse holding up a picture of the stint they used in my heart.

I strangely notice the company name and said “I was made in Petaluma too”, this is totally classic for me to get a life saving stint from a company in my hometown. Something about that settles very well with me.