Life Post-Dissection and Heart Attack

Sometimes it's hard to explain to people how my life is different than it was before my spontaneous dissection and heart attack.

Here's a few examples.

Every so often, I like to change things up -- get a new purse, get a new, different color or style of wallet, etc.

Before, I could make my choice solely on finding something I really liked.

Now, my wallet purchases are based primarily on whether my two stent cards, pictured below, will fit. If they don't fit, it doesn't matter how much I love the potential new wallet; it's not coming home with me:



The cards are laminated to preserve the information; thus, they don't fold up neatly to credit-card size.

Another thing. Before, if I was sick and wanted some chicken soup, I could just buy it at the store.

Side note: Cooking is not my forte and it's not something that I enjoy. I realize that other people do, but I've never been particularly good at it, and my repertoire of dishes that I make and that taste acceptable is fairly small.

But now, thanks to having to watch my sodium intake, eating a bowl of chicken soup is no longer a spur-of-the-moment whim--seriously, check out the sodium content on most soups, and remember to double the number because even the microwavable bowls are two servings. And recall that healthy sodium intake is 2,000 mg/day, ideally less. You can get that in a single bowl if you're not careful.

Healthy Choice's Chicken with Wild Rice is a typical offering in the microwave chicken soup category; if you eat the whole bowl, you're getting 900 mg of sodium in one sitting -- because honestly now, who eats just half the bowl? It's not like you can really save it.

This means that if I want soup, I have to make it myself, and let me express my gratitude to whoever it was who invented the slow cooker.

Last night I spent a couple of hours chopping up chicken breast, chopping assorted vegetables, cooking the chicken, then putting everything in the crock pot so that eight hours later, I have a big batch of low-sodium soup, like so:



I'm having a tooth pulled (back upper left molar) tomorrow, you see, and have been warned that I'll probably be eating soft foods for several days after. So instead of going to the store and buying several cans of soup, I spent part of my weekend making it from scratch.

Now maybe these are things that wouldn't upset the apple cart of your life--if you love cooking, and if you're less fickle than I am about your purses and wallets... and don't get me wrong, I don't sit around wringing my hands about my limited accessory choices or the fact that I have to do a lot more advance meal planning--it's just the way my life is now, and it's different--more complicated--than it was before.

Birthday thanks, and adventures in baking

Thanks to everyone who helped celebrate my birthday (belated) yesterday, and thanks to everyone who sent good wishes. The best present of all was getting to see so many friends and spend time with people I hadn't seen in some cases, literally, in years, as well as getting further acquainted with people I've previously just interacted with online.

Miranda deserves mad props for making me not one but TWO cakes. See, now that I'm on a low-sodium diet, I thought it would a smart thing to find replacements for baking soda and baking powder which are made from sodium bicarbonate. There's one baking powder substitute that's made from calcium carbonate, and I'd bought some.

So I gave some to M. for making my cake. Everything on the container and on the company's website said that calcium carbonate works just like baking soda, but it's completely sodium free, and that for best results, you need to just double the amount called for in recipes. So I passed that along to Miranda.

Well. As the kids today say, this calcium carbonate is MADE OF FAIL.

For those who don't know her, Miranda is in fact a first-rate baker. She made mine and Paul's wedding cake 10 years ago and has seriously considered opening her own bakery, so I highly doubt the problem was at her end...

First, she told me that the cake wasn't rising as much as expected.

Then when it came out of the oven, all the rising it did, undid itself.

THEN, it kept... shrinking. Finally, she was left with a tiny brick that she threw away, after tasting it and determining that it even tasted like @ss, too. She told me that at the point when she tossed it, the end product had less than half the volume of the batter.

We were joking that all those people who thought the LHC was going to end the world were correct--they just had the wrong LHC. It's not this one, it's my failed birthday cake, which has turned into a black hole in her garbage can, where no doubt it continues to collapse in on itself.

So she started again and did another version, which looked and tasted terrific--there was not a scrap left at the end of the night. Is that awesome or what? After the first one turned into The Singularity That's Going to Destroy Us All, most people would have said, "Screw it, you're getting a store-bought cake."

Good friends, good food, lots of hanging out and visiting. I couldn't ask for a better celebration. Thanks, everyone.

Though I do wish that whoever anonymously bought me Where the Deep Ones Are from my Amazon wishlist would say something so I could be properly appreciative... :)

A Good Day

It was a good weekend, really, but yesterday was an especially good day, for several reasons. One, good friends Izzy and Dan (minus Christine who was having neck trouble, alas), and the Sanford Pottery Festival. Funnel cake and kettle corn for lunch, woo! Also lots of cool pottery things which I gamely resisted buying--even so, I still came home with a very small bowl, a Christmas tree ornament shaped like a black kitty, a crescent moon magnet, a small outhouse for my dad, and some citrus-scented body powder. Yes, that's restrained, shut up. ;)

Two, for the most part, it was a normal day. I hung out with friends, doing fun things. Then came home, washed my hair, and chilled out in front of the TV, hung out with Paul when he came in from his tennis match. We did dishes. He made pizza. And it was fine. It was normal. It was good.

Other good things from the weekend:

Friday = First of May; see this funny but NOT WORK-SAFE VIDEO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-77ElyvRxI

Saturday = gaming group. First time playing our rpg since the end of March; it felt great to get back to the characters and dice again.

Three, cleared out the pantry of some stuff I can't really eat anymore and gave it to someone who can, so that was good.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining it well. It was just good to have a normal weekend.

One month ago today

One month ago today, Paul and I were sitting in the emergency room at UNC Hospitals, wondering what the hell just happened. It would be almost 12 hours more before we would find out for sure that I'd had a heart attack, and it'll be a month tomorrow that they did the cardiac catheterization and found the tear and the SCAD and put the stents in.

Not surprisingly, I'm having a few anxiety twinges this morning. I've already done a meditation/relaxation CD and had my morning devotional and prayer time.

At some point, I'm sure the heart attack won't loom so large; it'll no longer be one of the first things I think about upon waking and one of the last things I think about before going to sleep.

I'll eventually get back to a point where I'll take for granted that I'll wake up the next morning.

There are new challenges now. A low-sodium diet for one. Remembering to take a lot of pills is another. Working on improving my stress management skills so that people and situations don't get the best of me. Finding my new limits while trying not to feel limited, if that makes sense. Making time to see friends and family.

Still trying to make sense of it all. SCADs are so rare and so random, I haven't really started too far down the path of "Why me???" because there's no good answer, physically OR spiritually.

Physically, it's "idiopathic," which is medical jargon for "we have *no* fucking clue." Which brings us back to why me, then? Dunno. Bad luck.

Spiritually, I have to ask: Did the hand of God come down and rip my right coronary artery apart to punish me? Dude, the worst thing I ever did was some petty shoplifting when I was, like 12. There are serial killers on the loose. Which brings us back around to why me? If God/dess had no hand in it, then it was truly random, bad luck.

There are lessons here, yes. This has been a big, spiritual and physical shake-up. I'm eating healthier. And while my triathlon training has been sidetracked, I'm slowly getting back into an exercise plan.

And I'm trying to remember to say "Thank you" and "I love you" to people in my life. That includes all of you (still) reading this. Regardless of when or how we met, or whether we know each other in real life or just online, thank you for being here.

The "hospital food" diet plan

Whether it was from almost a week of icky hospital food or what, I'm down another few pounds; so far since I started in August 2008 I've removed 21 pounds total. I still have a lot of work to do, but this is a big milestone for me, and I'm pleased to have gotten here.

Also this morning was my orientation session for cardiac rehab at Meadowmont. It's a very nice facility, comparable to the gym I've been going to since August, Duke Health & Fitness. The cardiac rehab program is 36 sessions, roughly 3 months. There's a lot of careful monitoring involved, a cardiologist always on site, etc. Next week is my stress test and educational classes, and I start the exercise program in earnest on May 11th.

One step forward, one step back

So, I'm back in the hospital.

Sigh.

Much as I really, really, REALLY didn't want to admit it, late last night I had to confess to Paul that I was having trouble occasionally getting a full breath. And that's one of the red flags that we've been told to watch for, so at roughly 11:30pm last night, we packed ourselves into the car and drove back to UNC Hospitals for another round of EKGs, blood draws, and endless waiting.

I'm not in the ICU; I'm just in a room in the regular unit.

The other good news is that pending a 1pm-ish blood draw result, we'll be able to go home.

My cardiologists don't think we were silly to come in. OTOH, they're pretty sure that what happened to me is a fairly common side effect of being laid up in bed for the better part of a week: a very small part of my lower left lung has slightly collapsed--they even have a special breathing exercise device that they usually send home with open-heart surgery patients to help prevent this exact thing, but they apparently didn't think to give me one because my surgery was all done through the leg cath.

The general feeling is better to be safe than sorry, and this is all new territory for Paul and me, as we're learning a whole new standard of what's "normal" for me. :/

Next | Previous