It was March of 2020, right when the Covid lockdown went into effect for most of California. I was streaming something on the TV in the living room by myself on a Sunday night, my wife had put the kids to bed and more often than naught she falls asleep in bed with them. So when my heart started racing I didn’t think to call out to her for help. Now, I struggle with depression and anxiety so the feeling of my heart racing didn’t feel too out of sorts for me. I thought, oh this is just one of those times I’m too much in my head about something, I’ll just smoke some weed and relax on the couch, that’ll help take my mind of off things and calm down. I had calmed down for a little bit, but that feeling kept coming back, so…ok, maybe one more show and I’ll just be too tired and fall asleep. But it wouldn’t go away. It kept coming and going, each time it felt like it was intensifying, I kept thinking “why can’t I calm down?” trying to will my heart to slow down. Soon it was getting hard for me to take a full breath. Luckily my wife had gotten up from the kids room and went into the living room to join me. I was curled up on the corner of the couch trying to catch my breath. She knew something was wrong, my breathing was shallow and I looked panicked. She asked me “What should I do, should I call 911?” At first I was a little hesitant, knowing how much ambulance rides are and thinking about what insurance covers and all that. I know…what a f-ed up system we have, I’m in a life threatening situation and all I can think of is my insurance coverage and my out of pocket costs. Things were quickly getting worse and it became an easy decision to call an ambulance. By that time I couldn’t take a full breath, let alone speak, so my wife was talking to the 911 dispatcher, not really knowing what to tell her. When the ambulance came they put an oxygen mask on me and got me onto a stretcher. After they loaded me into the back they told my wife which hospital they were headed to and away we went.
While I was laying in the back the paramedic kept talking to me trying to keep me calm, and figure out what was happening to me. He was counting and trying to get me to mimic his breathing, but I couldn’t. I was trying to breath, I was trying to tell him with my eyes that I was trying my hardest to take a deep breath and I just couldn’t. After assessing me in the back, it became apparent to him that something was going on with my heart and they needed to get me to the hospital quick. He told the driver something and they changed course to get me to a different hospital than originally planned. Maybe it was quicker or had better capability to deal with whatever issues might come up. Whatever the reason was, I ended up somewhere totally different so my wife had no clue where I was, I can only imagine the added fear and confusion this brought her.
After arriving at the hospital I was rushed into the ER and it was unreal. It felt like that scene in ET where the doctors all have those suits that covered them head to toe in the zippered tent, remember this was in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. I was brought into an isolated room with glass walls. I remember the different doctors and nurses having to put on those biohazard suits before entering and examining me. They were trying to avoid coming in and out and minimize the amount of contact to avoid possible exposure to Covid. It was crazy scary. Once the nurses and doctors came into the room they were basically locked in there with me. There was a room full of nurses and doctors on one side of the glass yelling questions and instructions to the fellow nurses and doctors on the other side of the glass. I remember seeing someone writing all my vitals on the glass wall backwards so that it could be read by everyone outside and continuously updating the numbers, it was like an episode of Grey’s anatomy.
They gave me something to slow my heart rate because it had gone up to around 220 beats per minute and wasn’t coming down. I was crawling out of my skin and trying to climb out of the bed because I couldn’t take it. Then I remember everything start to go black and it being hard to stay awake. I couldn’t keep my eyes open or my head up, they kept yelling at me to stay with them. The last thought I had was oh shit, this is what it’s like to die, I guess I’m dying. I wish I could say that I had an out of body experience or saw my life flash before my eyes but everything just went black.
I woke up on Tuesday to the sensation of a tube being pulled out of my throat. I gagged, my eyes were watering and bloodshot, my arms were purple and bruised all over from all the lines and IV’s they had to put in me, my chest had rashes and burns from the defibrillator pads. I knew I was in a hospital, I remember the ambulance ride and the ER, but I had no idea how bad it went, how I was unconscious for a day, needed a breathing tube, and that for 10 minutes my heart had stopped beating and the only thing keeping me alive was CPR. The doctor had been worried and told my wife that my condition was “touch and go” and “could have gone either way.”
The next few days I spent in the hospital bed slipping in and out of consciousness, having conversations I don’t remember. It was a crazy twist of fate that I ended up in a hospital where my neighbor and a parent from my child’s preschool both worked at. I was cut off from the outside world- no visitors because of covid, no phone since I was only in my jammies when I went into the ambulance – so seeing a couple of familiar faces after such an experience was a welcome surprise. They were able to give my wife updates and let her know how I was doing and eventually get my phone and charger to me.
They told me that my heart had enlarged to 1.5 times the normal size and that I had ventricular tachycardia (Vtach) – a condition where the heart gets into a dangerous, potentially fatal, rhythm. At the time they didn’t really know how I got the condition or what the treatment for me would be yet, but they did know that I needed something to protect me from going into that dangerous rhythm again, because if I did my heart would not be able to take it. So before I left the hospital they needed to perform a surgery to implant a device to protect me from future episodes of Vtach – an ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator) that is wired to my heart and would essentially send a shock to my heart to get it back into a normal rhythm. And because I’ve had it all my life, my heart has become weak, really weak. It pumps out less than half as much blood as a healthy heart. I’m technically living in a state of heart failure.
Looking back, I now know that this didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a condition that I’ve had all my life but never knew, it runs in my family, caused by the LMNA gene mutation. My family has a history of heart issues, an aunt and cousin who were seemingly healthy died in the hospital unexpectedly because their heart “just failed”, but that was in the Philippines during the late 80’s / early 90’s, they barely had running water and electricity, so medical care was expected to be less than stellar. I ignored the warning signs, or I didn’t know what to look for, I chalked everything up to getting old. I had always been a skinny guy, it took a lot of work for me to gain weight, I had to lift weights regularly and drink supplement shakes just to stay at 150 lbs (yeah, all the ladies I knew hated it), so when I started gaining weight and getting bloated (I was 181lbs when I was brought to the ER) I thought my metabolism was just finally slowing down. I considered myself to be in pretty good shape, I used to (with an emphasis on USED TO) run 10k’s, do martial arts and lift weights. But I was juggling being a new father and a demanding job, I had no time for those activities anymore, so when I was regularly getting winded doing tasks that I otherwise would have had no problem doing, I just thought I was out of shape. I have an anxiety disorder, so I thought the pounding in my chest was just part of the deal. But now I know better, I was able to tell my brother and when he started seeing the signs he immediately got checked out and got ahead of it. So at least some good came out of it.
Photography by Rex 