I woke up at 3:00 in the morning, and was immediately aware that something was very wrong with my heart - I could feel it. I could feel it moving in my chest like a rodent in a bag trying to get out, and worse, I could feel that my heartbeat was not right - runs of three, runs of five, runs of ten, and the dirty great gaps in the middle with no beat at all.
It’s sort of hard to believe that this sort of thing is actually happening to you, especially at 3:00 in the morning, when every single thing that goes through your head already feels like it’s just some stupid paranoid fantasy. (God knows, I’m the paranoid fantasy king these days anyway.) I fucked around for an hour or two hoping the feeling would just go away; I watched some TV and had a sandwich and surfed the internet for pictures of naked women, all while trying to see if I could come up with some sort of proof that what I thought was happening was actually happening. It turns out that checking your own pulse is hard. But just before five I had my hand firmly on my chest and I felt my heart blast through ten beats very quickly, and then do nothing for a while, and then beat three times out of sync, and then I officially panicked and called my parents to take me to the hospital.
I hate waking my parents up in the middle of the night. I worry that my mother spends her entire life in anticipation of these moments, when that phone is finally going to ring at 4:52 a.m. and it’s going to be the big bad news falling from the sky - like her eldest son saying that something is wrong with his heart. No matter: it had to be done. They jumped in the car and headed my way. I waited.
That was when I cried, not because I was scared, but because sitting alone in the dark with your cat, in a state of complete helplessness, is very sad. I didn’t ever really think I was going to die, but nor did I particularly feel like the living either. I was in the in-between place.
Zam - who does not like people at the best of times - sat quietly with me until ten seconds before the phone rang announcing the car’s arrival, whereupon she jumped up and ran to the door.
My parents took me to Sunnybrook Hospital. I told the duty nurse that I thought I was having an irregular heartbeat. She referred me to the triage nurse - an elder firebrand named Marilyn - who sat me down, felt my pulse, and said “Well, you certainly are!” Score one for my first ringing self-diagnosis; I even got to nod sagely when she said “cardiac arrhythmia.” Any fears on my part of being made to wait in a waiting room on this particular Good Friday in North Toronto were immediately removed; it seems that when your heart is going off like the Tasmanian Devil, you get ushered straight inside. I got ushered straight inside. I got put on a gurney - placed, rather unfortunately, directly beneath a sign that said “D.O.A. Room” - and hooked up to the EKG, after which I was whisked into the Acute room and made into a cyborg.
Leads all over my body, oxygen tubes into my nose, and a big honkin’ IV in my right arm. I thought I’d been through the worst needle stick of my whole life - last summer, when getting a blood test, and being subsequently treated to a lurid red-and-blue-and-yellow nebula pattern on my arm around the puncture for the next six weeks - but this one quickly claimed the ground: have you ever had an IV stick fail? Have you ever had an elder firebrand of a triage nurse dig around in your wrist vein to try to fix the stick without removing it? Because I have. Eventually Marilyn gave up on my wrist altogether and found a more willing vein in my forearm. For this amount of trouble, I might as well have done all that heroin I never did.
A greying, jovial fellow named Dr. MacDonald confirmed the diagnosis, that my heart was beating both irregularly and far too fast. He immediately gave me a drug to bring my heart rate down; it made my face flush bright pink and my skin feel tingly and hot. It also made the uncomfortable squirrel-in-the-chest sensation finally (!) go away, but I could also still feel the off-beats, the stupid inept jazz combo in my center that just couldn’t figure its shit out. The doctor’s hope was that with the drugs, my heart would find its way back to a normal rhythm. He revealed my high score: at its most manic, my heart rate had hit a staggering 170 beats per minute.
By this point, Elder Firebrand Nurse was replaced by the inevitable Young Hot Nurse, a Romanian supermodel with eyelashes that reached halfway to her hairline. I was consigned to the waiting game, while the car accident victim across from me bled on himself, and the crazy Russian woman in congestive heart failure to my immediate left was noisily given a foley catheter because she’d already peed about eleven times in the past hour. My parents toured in to see me one by one, which is not something I particularly wanted, if only because I looked like such a fucking cliché; the stupid hospital gown and the oxygen tubes and the IV and the chest leads and the goddamned beeping monitor and everything - such a cliché!! Plus, the thing about a hydrating IV? Sort of turns your bladder into a time bomb. There is no substitute for the moment when you’ve been talking to your mother and Young Hot Nurse tosses you a grey box made out of egg-carton material for you to piss in. At least the hole was appropriately man-sized.
After an hour, the first run of chemicals had sufficiently controlled my heart rate but my rhythm was still left-of-center. Dr. MacDonald gave me another push of the same drug to see if this would be enough to solve the problem. Should it fail, he explained, there would be two options. The first would be a second drug to control the rhythm; the downside of that would be the potential side-effects of its combination with the first drug, which could result in my heart rate dropping precipitously and all the inclement complications that go along with that. Option #2 was the cardioversion - an electrical jolt to the heart to reset the electrical signal. “I’ve always wanted to try that,” I joked. (As it turns out, my sense of humour doesn’t translate very well through an oxygen mask.) The downside of Option #2 was the potential for permanent damage to the heart muscle. Regardless of the eventualities, the doc gave me an hour or two to see if the second run of drugs was going to take effect, and to ponder the imponderables. I got to spend an hour or two on a gurney, contemplating a world without Matt Brown.
The shifts changed over. Elder Firebrand Nurse and Young Hot Nurse were replaced by an acerbic smartass named Gina and a brainy little caregiver named Jennifer. Gina was nice enough to let me go pee in an actual bathroom; in the four minutes it took to unhook me from all of my various tubules, I commented dryly about finally having an appreciation for what Darth Vader goes through every morning. And folks, that moment of staggering up the hallway in your hospital gown with your various ports and guages taped together all over your arm just so you can pee standing up in a real human toilet... worth its weight in gold. Best moment of my day so far.
Back in bed, I did my best to just stay calm and try to positive-think my way out of this mess. I got tired of watching my heart readout fairly early in the game - the doctor and I joked about it being the worst tease television show ever, worse than Lost. Again, at no point did I really feel like I was going to die today; it was just the vague awareness of the inevitability of it all, on the first time my body ever really tried to kill me. There was a lot of talk throughout about my young healthy heart and how the various courses of treatment would therefore likely be entirely successful... and the corollary sense that the slow process of breaking down had nevertheless begun and was showing itself, and would eventually pass anyone’s ability to fix. I’m not a man who’s lately had any real difficulty understanding the true nature of life on this earth, but I’ve also never been tested for that faith, either. And my age kept tattooing itself across my cortex like its own heartbeat - 29, 29, 29. I’m twenty-nine fucking years old.
My number finally came up, because the second round of drugs had produced no positive effect besides keeping my heart rhythm within the normal range. Decision time. Each option with its own potential downsides, I decided that the idea of two drugs mixing up in my system and slowing my heart rate did, in fact, frighten me a lot more than having my stupid misbehavin’ heart muscle electroshocked back into coherence. Cardioversion it was.
Jennifer prepped me, putting big 5x5 sticky pads on my right chest and under my left arm, to conduct the current. We joked about how much fun it was going to be to rip them off, and half my chest hair with them. The doctor gave me the most adorable drug called Fentanyl, saying that it caused most patients to skip the procedure altogether, waking up after it was over, wondering when it would start. If you have the means, I highly recommend getting your hands on some for your next party. The neon lights in the Acute room were covered by these weird fishscale-patterned plastic sheets; moments after the Fent went in, I watched in amazement as those fishscales began to bleed and swim and melt right off the ceiling in front of me. And being by now in a very comfortable state, I really didn’t mind when Dr. MacDonald and Jennifer ran a gajillion volts of Niagara Pure straight through my heart.
I was vaguely aware that Zap #1 didn’t work and that they were going to go for Zap #2, but I can tell you quite explicitly that not only did I not care, but I was rather pleased at the whole thing.
Here’s what my heart rhythm looked like before the second zap:
Here’s what it looks like when you run (double) a gajillion volts of Niagara Pure through my heart:
And here’s what human life is supposed to look like:
The Fentanyl didn’t make me forget the zaps, as Dr. MacDonald had expected; the details around them are a bit hazy, but I’ll remember being electrified for the rest of my life. I must have passed out immediately afterwards, though, because I completely skipped the removal of the lead pads from my chest, which would have been my preference anyway. I happily dozed for a little while, remembering for the first time that I hadn’t really slept the night prior.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, I was good to go. Literally. It was that simple. I got up I noticed a curious sensation where my legs seemed to weigh twice as much as the rest of my body, and I do remember being slightly over-enthusiastic when Jennifer gave me my EKG readout so that I could put it on my blog, but otherwise I was so completely back to normal that it was almost unnerving: did the whole thing really happen?
I spent the rest of the day hyper-aware of my chest cavity, but thankfully, the squirrels have gone.
