We Be Jammin'

 It's been a rough few weeks, but things are finally back on track.

For the past four years, I've had horrible health issues plaguing me, starting with breast cancer. Cancer medication made me put on a lot of weight, and then I got COVID in 2021, and I ended up fatigued and unable to really breathe well. Exercise was impossible, so I couldn't get the weight off. Up until last weekend, I couldn't walk more than a block. 

Things came to a crisis on vacation with my family in Jamaica. I'd had trouble all week, unable to walk from one place to another without resting. Luckily our resort offers shuttle service because it's a huge resort.

Thursday night was karaoke night. In the past ten years, Jack and I always wowed the crowd or won the prizes at various karaoke nights at the resort. This year, I didn't volunteer, having no breath in me to sing anything. My amazing sons and daughters-in-law are professional-level singers, so Liz had them swooning with "Black Velvet," while Jesse wooed them with "Easy Like Sunday Morning" just so he could say, "Here's to all of you celebrating 4/20" (which was the date) before singing "I'm gonna get hiiiiigh... so high." Buddy knocked their socks off with "Walkin' in Memphis" before kicking into "This Is How We Do It," freestyling with color details of our resort and its people and drinks.

Buddy's 3yo son hates applause though. So, by the time Buddy was into his third number, the poor little guy was downright screaming, and his poor mom Lindsay had her hands full trying to calm him. I thought I'd help out, being an obnoxious grandma, so I lifted him into my arms and carried him away from the show and the noise.

Or at least I tried to. I took about ten awkward steps when suddenly it felt like I'd been hit with a cannonball. I was gulping for air and couldn't find any. I mean, I was going through the motions of breathing, but nothing was getting to my body. I thought I was having a heart attack except it didn't have any of the classic heart attack symptoms like pain in the arm, sharp pains in the chest. It was just an immense pressure on my chest, and utter weakness. Buddy reclaimed his son, and--being an idiot who didn't want anyone to worry--I went back to my room to sleep it off.

It was the next night at dinner, our last night in Jamaica, when I began to seize up with tremors and chills, that Buddy and Liz insisted I go down to the nurse. But I couldn't get that far. A worker at the resort got me a wheelchair, and when the nurse showed up she took one look at me and said, "I think you need to go to ER because I can't treat you here. You need a cardiologist."

This is the lovely Hospiten Montego Bay. We took a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in the $600 ambulance at night, and the wonderful Dr. Donnices Greaves Street, cardiologist, treated me with devoted attention, and Jack could stay with me in the room, but by Sunday ($11k later) we were out of clothes, and we still had no answers. I hadn't had a heart attack, and echocardiograms and ultrasounds could find no heart issues. She urged me to stay until I could at least walk and breathe, but we convinced her to give me a release to fly home so I could get treated here.  

We had missed all flights out on Sunday, but Jack found a little motel literally at the end of the runway of the airport on a dead-end Kent Street, next to a little bar restaurant called Wingz and Tingz, across from DeadEnd Beach, a local hot spot. I didn't have far to walk, and we got a room on the ground floor. What you can't see from this picture is that the left half of the restaurant behind the bar is out under the stars with cement tables and benches and tropical plants. Absolutely lovely. And believe it or not, there are actually more beers in Jamaica than Red Stripe!

Now the story gets good. We got home Monday night. I had already contacted my cardiologist about all that had gone on. I figured I should go to ER, right? Well, no, Dr. Greaves had ruled out heart attack, so if I'd gone to ER, they'd have sent me home. So I had to wait to see my cardiologist on Thursday morning. He took one look at me and said, "Go to the ER right now. I'll get you admitted right away."

And he did. I had a heart catheterization that afternoon. Nothing wrong with the heart. That upset me because here I was lying in a hospital flat on my back when I could have been huffing and puffing at Heliosphere at my book launch if nothing was wrong with  me.

Now I've got a huge pain in the groin (they sent the catheter up the artery and vein) and no answers. They notice my feet and ankles are swollen, so they figure Lasix is a good plan of action. They shoot me up and the next thing I know, holy momma, I had to set aside 67 years of potty training as 15 pounds of fluid was drained from me in two days.

The following day, they did another echocardiogram, but this time the tech dug that probe between my ribs and shoved my implant a few inches out of the way and finally found the issue: diastolic noncompliance.

Being a teacher, I associate the word "noncompliant" with "disobedient," but what the heck...

It means that when blood is pumped into my heart, the walls of the heart don't expand enough to take it all in, so the backwash sends the blood out into capillaries that dump extraneous fluid into the nearest depot, which is the lungs, causing congestive heart failure.

CHF. THAT'S what hit me in the chest. 

The upshot is that I'm on Lasix, I can breathe, and I feel better than I've felt in at least two years.

It's all irie.