I had a heart attack, a big one, a bad one, the widowmaker kind.
I'm 42. I'm not the fittest or the healthiest, but I'm not unfit or unhealthy either. That didn't stop my heart from clogging really badly.
The night
I'd been decorating for the ninth day in a row. There's a house I want to buy but I need to get mine on the market first. I hadn't been sleeping.
Friday night, before the dog walk, I felt dizzy. My chest felt congested. I went on the walk anyway.
We got back and I lay on the sofa. Couldn't settle. Tried the bed. Tried the floor instead, the dog curled up next to me, I assured him I was ok. Nothing helped.
I took my blood pressure. Too high. I found a single leftover ramipril from March and took it, and waited for it to work.
Another hour passed. Lying on the floor, I thought: what if it actually is a heart attack? I took an aspirin too.
I was throwing up. Five hours after the dizziness started, I called an ambulance.
When the paramedics walked in, I said, "I really hope this is a really bad panic attack."
Full sentences
I walked to the ambulance. Not steady, but I could walk. I could talk in full sentences — tell Simon what to pack, joke with the paramedics.
They took me to the major incident part of A&E. People came in and out, adding more drugs, more cables. Then, all of a sudden, we moved to resus, just the other side of the corridor. That upped the fear a little. But the morphine had kicked in and I felt better.
I got tired of saying the pain was a 6. I don't really know what a 6 means. It wasn't worse than my period pain. It was just annoying the crap out of me, and I wanted to go to sleep. By then it was about 5am.
Soft blues
We were left alone in resus after the GTN infusion had been turned off for fifteen minutes or so. They were deciding between it being my heart or my lungs. The pain coming back told them it was my heart.
It was quiet. A&E seemed like it was sleeping. Shift change happened, people milling about. Suddenly three paramedics and a nurse came in to move me to BHI. I remember saying "ok" like I knew what that meant.
Simon interjected: "What is going on? What is BHI?"
"Oh, no one has told you. I'll find the doctor."
The next twenty minutes were a whirlwind. We raced down into Bristol from Southmead with soft blues. Everyone seemed more worried about the infusion machine bouncing off my legs than me personally. We chatted about the weather, and about how the paramedics can go 50% over the speed limit but the ambulance can't, because it'll fall apart. The nurse clung to her seat because she could see we were driving on the wrong side of the road at points.
If you need to get into Bristol city centre quickly, an ambulance is fast but I don't recommend it.
We got to the Bristol Heart Institute, which I genuinely didn't know existed, tucked round the back of the BRI. Straight into the Cath Lab, I was told we were going. Except the doctors there wanted to do their own tests and observations. Night turned into day. Food came and went. I lay in bed, not sleeping, not allowed anything to eat until 7pm, when they decided I needed an angiogram.
Just before everyone rushed in, I remember the nurses looking at me from afar. I was feeling very drained and woozy. Mostly I was tired and hungry and bored of lying in the sweaty bed.
What the room tells you
I've watched enough Grey's Anatomy to know that when the surgical student doing your angiogram gets excited and the whole team says "wow," it's because it's a fun problem for them to solve — and a bad situation for me to be in. When the lead surgeon takes over and says "this is my responsibility now." When the whole room goes deadly quiet. When the person administering the warfarin says, "Seriously, that's twenty minutes."
They fixed me
I watch the screen during the angiogram, the same way I watch my colonoscopies, except this is more comfortable. There's a track along the bottom of the screen — the path into my heart the camera has just taken. It's clogged. There isn't much black in the middle. It looks like ground-penetrating radar on Time Team, like Tony Robinson is about to say they've found a Roman mosaic floor in my heart.
I lie still as they push more and more things into me. "A non-compliant this." A "2.5 that.". "Whatever that was, it's now kissing something else, probably isn't as romantic as it sounds." The blackness in the middle gets wider. The imaging of my heart above looks more like tree roots and less like a motorway.
Another emergency came in about halfway through, and they didn't rush me. They stayed calm and patient and considered, changing their minds, discussing the right course of action, explaining things to the student. Talking quietly at times. I fiddled with the sheet with my left hand and wondered if my right was still holding the handle. I think it was. Everything was so numb.
Then they do one bit and a lot of heaviness is suddenly gone, and they announce they're done, retract all the wires.
They fixed me.
Because of the other emergency, the doctor only popped over briefly to see how I was. I muttered something about needing to do strength training now I'm over 40. He said, "Yeah, me too." I don't know why that stuck. It was probably the drugs.
Dirty feet
I was whisked back to the ward, where my chilli con carne had gone cold and been swapped for an egg sandwich of underwhelming delight. The plastic balloon on my wrist was itchy, and the wires and machines made sleeping hard, but I was exhausted, and sleep was what I needed to do next. The nurse explained she'd come in every hour to let a little air out of the balloon, keeping all the blood in my body where it belonged.
I struggled to sleep. My stomach was doing flips. I had to ask for buscopan and the commode, twice — the nurse had to go to the other hospital to fetch the medicine for me. I really needed it. When it kicked in, I finally slept.
I was woken at 7am for toast and marmite. Shortly after, yet another doctor came to examine me. He expressed his disgust for my dirty feet, and everyone laughed. Then I was told to get up and out of bed. The cables were upgraded to a wireless little number, and I moved to the chair.
This made me very happy. Now I could poop in the loo.
The little dot on my wrist
By this point it was Sunday. The nurses were chill, everyone just ticking over, some better than others. At some point that day the wristband came off, and I was left alone in my big empty space in the critical care ward, with this little dot on my wrist.
The little dot felt like a miracle. One little point of entry to fix my heart.
It took my breath away, and I realised I had had a heart attack.