Friday, May 29, 2009

I had a meltdown today

I had a meltdown in cardiac rehab this morning. I feel like a big ol' crybaby. And part of me wants to just BE that two-year-old, and have a typical terrible two-year-old's temper tantrum. I want my old life back!

What happened was that I started having some pain in my left arm. When I had my heart attack at the end of March, I also had left arm pain, so as I'm sure you can all imagine, I was freaking out a little.

The nurses did a paddle check--minds out of the gutters, you pervs; it's not as fun as it sounds. ;) They hooked me up to the defibrillator and printed out a little EKG strip and said everything looked normal, but they could tell I was stressed so they had me sit down and drink some water.

At which point I started crying, because I'm tired of being the person who freaks out about a tiny bit of arm pain. I'm tired of worrying about every small twinge and ache. I DON'T WANNA ANYMORE. I want my old life back.

They also checked my blood pressure, which was a little elevated (for me--118/80), so they gave me a nitro pill under my tongue and called the in-house cardiologist over. She reassured me that the arm pain by itself, with no other symptoms like shortness of breath, was highly unlikely to be indicative of a problem. And also that the location of the pain meant that it most likely wasn't my heart.

And lastly, since the nitro wasn't helping, they said that was the most indicative of all that I wasn't having any heart trouble.

It'll be two months tomorrow. The heart attack and SCAD are a big black line that divides my life into "before" and "after," and I'm tired of living in the "after." I want to go back to the "before."

Obviously I know this isn't possible, and I think that's why I was crying this morning. It's all the anger and grief finally coming out. I haven't really had a complete and total meltdown about what happened to me yet, and I think I'm finally starting to. :/

It didn't particularly help that there's a lot of stress at work today--several important things that we sent to a major conference that's going on right now in New York City have been lost, one of our authors didn't get his plane ticket reserved, and another one's reservation got messed up.

None of which were my screw-ups (thank GAWD), but I was running around trying to fix at least some of them this afternoon, and I'm feeling very fragile right now. In fact, I need to go take a minute and blow my nose.

I'm seeing my therapist again next week. I really like her. I'm on an antidepressant already, one that I've been on for years. Maybe I need a little more help for the next little while. Anyway, thank you all for being here. As I've said before, I know my blog has somewhat turned into the "all heart all the time" blog of late.


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