you know, when you wake up in the morning you have a certain set of expectations as to what the day has in store for you... a list of things that are going to happen before you get back into bed at the end of the day. today i expected to do a little knitting, run a durham symphony concert, and maybe have a nice dinner.
what i didn't count on was hearing that my little brother had a heart attack.
it all started as pneumonia, he says, back around monday or tuesday. he watched his temperature; it peaked at 104. his wife took him to the the urgent care clinic where he got a prescription for antibiotic. he went home and laid on the couch alternately shivering and sweating for a couple of days, and just tried to rest and recover.
then on friday afternoon he says "i started having massive burning pains in my chest that would not subside, along with a dull, throbbing ache in my left forearm." terrified, they went back to the clinic. the doctor saw some questionable things on his EKG and sent him off to the emergency room. tests indicated he had had a heart attack.
but further investigation (including cardiac catheterization to look for blockages; there were none) showed, in fact, it was not so much a heart attack as pericarditis, and though he was perdiodically in extreme pain he somehow had escaped permanent heart damage. thank god.
i have to quote a little bit of his email here, because quite honestly i don't ever want to forget what he went through:
4:00 am Saturday morning now, the nurse comes in to get a couple of vials of blood, and I can't get back to sleep because I have a bit of mild pain in my chest again. 10 minutes later, it is full-blown, worst-pain-I've-ever-felt chest pains again, left arm hurting so badly that I can't even move it around. We hammer the nurse call button, she comes in and hits me up with the anti-inflammatory again, but it took an hour to take effect last time and it is much worse this time. I get a morphine shot in my IV, which has absolutely no effect. I am literally writhing on my hospital bed in pain because I can't lay still, and Lulu is at her wits' end because it is obvious that nothing is helping, and the nurse has run out of options according to the doctor's orders for my care. The nurse can't reach my cardiologist, but she gets his partner, and they OK a dose of dilaudid, which unbelievably eliminates ALL of my pain within 30 seconds, leaving me basically zombi-fied, but able to speak slowly and groggily. When the dilaudid wears off, the anti-inflammatory has taken effect, and I feel good enough to sleep.jezus.
rob finally sleeps for a couple of hours. he wakes up before midnight and watches saturday turn into sunday, which happens to be his 33rd birthday.
the good news is 1) he's alive, and 2) he's basically back to normal. thankfully pericarditis is treatable with anti-inflammatory drugs, and when he was discharged this morning they didn't even tell him to avoid exertion. he can go right back to normal life. (he needs to avoid heavy lifting for several days while the plug in his femoral artery --from his catheterization-- heals, and he needs some rest to finish recovering from the pneumonia, but other than that he's apparently in tip-top shape.)
from all accounts his pericarditis was the result of a massive viral infection that attacked the fluid around his heart. (pneumonia is a bacterial infection, so that likely wasn't the cause of it... though it could have easily reduced his ability to fight this viral infection.) in short, it was all a fluke. my brother was (and is) in very good health. this could have happened to anybody. but it happened to my brother, and i was really scared for him.
when i got to the bottom of his email and he was reassuring us he was ok, my next thought was of lulu, his pregnant wife. i can only imagine what private hell she was going through, watching rob writhe in pain like that.
thankfully, i got in touch with rob by phone last night and just hearing his voice was reassuring.
Posted by xta at April 18, 2004 11:19 PM | TrackBack