David walked into the living room with his hand over his heart, as if he was planning on doing a quick pledge of allegiance. "I have chest pains." was what he said, though. "I think it could be indigestion."
So what exactly do you do when your husband announces, out of the blue, that he's having chest pains that might be indigestion? This is what came to mind in the space of a second: Make chamomile tea, get him some Mylanta, get a taxi to the hospital (but what hospital??), call 911. As I headed to the kitchen to put water on for tea he announced new developments. "The pain is worse and I'm sweating." I dialed 911.
It seems the daily rags are always running horror stories about 911. Slow response, inability to move in snarled traffic, EMS/Fire Dept. turf wars, not to mention non-working 911 numbers. I can't say if any of those stories are real or not. What I can say is that EMS and Fire Department heros saved my husband's life last January. Within what seemed like seconds, the Fire Department showed up at our door. 4, perhaps 5 (I was dazed and not recording details) hunks in full gear tromped through our living room carrying axes, walkie talkies, and oxygen. I watched the snow and mud from their boots drip onto our floors and rugs and offered a silent promise that if David was OK I would never worry about people tracking in mud again. The Firemen surrounded David, taking vitals from him and information from me. They were, they told me, going to give first-aid until EMS showed up - which they did a few minutes later.
Exit FD hunks, enter the EMS angels. My angels were two men who immediately hooked David up to a portable EKG machine and determined that, yes, it was a heart attack. I paced circles in the apartment, my normally excitable puppy curled quietly in my arms. On some doggy level, she understood the gravity of what was happening and was sitting it out as passively as possible. Good dog.
As I was pacing from living room, to bedroom, and back again, I paused in front of the sofa where my husband was seated. The portable EKG had cracked the top of our glass coffee table and I added never again worrying about damaged furniture to my earlier promise. I looked at David and suddenly, in a kind of slow motion and entirely unbelievably, his eyes rolled up and then closed and he slowly slumped sideways on the sofa. The realization of what I'd just seen came slowly. The thought of David dying, just like that, in front of me, was so incomprehensible that I had to parse the information into small chunks in order to understand it. Eyes roll. Body slumps. Face turns purple. Got it. I knew I had to say something, but could only manage a small, choked plea. "Help him. Please help him, he's dying." My EMS angels never missed a beat, never broke a sweat.
Without looking up they reassured me. "We are. We're helping him." The portable EKG machine, it turns out, is also a portable defibrillator, which, as I know from medical authorites as respected as Marcus Welby, MD, the good doctors of St. Elsewhere, and the crew in ER, is what zaps you back from the dead. And it did. Within seconds David was sputtering back to life, arms flailing as if he were fighing off death itself. I kneeled next to him, the puppy limp in my lap. "It's ok", I told him. "You're all right."
He asked what happened. I wanted to tell him, "You died and some angels brought you back. You scared the living shit out of me. You left me and I thought I would never see you again."
Instead I told him he fell asleep for a minute. But he was awake now.
2:39:29 PM 
|
|
