The clinicians seemed to be queuing outside my room, waiting their turn to come in and tell me how lucky I was. By my second day in the ICU, 6 nurses, two nursing assistants, one domestic assistant, three doctors and two consultants had all told me how incredibly lucky I was. They all began their sentences in the same way “Do you know how incredibly lucky you are?”
By day 3 I was ready to say to them “Yeah, yeah, I know…. I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky lucky, I should be so lucky etc” (thank you Kylie), but then they took my morphine drip bag away and I wasn’t inclined to tell them anything, let alone sing. This was the first day of wearing what I later described as “my pain vest” and without my good friend morphine, I wasn’t feeling terribly lucky.
I’d taken my heart for granted all my life. I worried about broken bones, spraining my ankle, I’d endured a torn tendon in my elbow, and I’d even had some gynaecological crap over the years, but I’d never once thought about my heart stopping.
But then, out of a clear blue sky, on 2 November 2022, I had a heart attack which was followed a few hours later by a full cardiac arrest and I died. I was brought back to life in the resus room of my local A&E and began my life as a statistic. A one in ten. An incredibly lucky person.
You soon realise that, yes, you’re lucky, but you’re also extremely unwell and you stay unwell for far longer than you might expect to. One of the best pieces of advice I was given was by a cardiac nurse who said to me “At one end we have a paper cut and the other end is death. The paper cut takes around 4 days to heal. Coming back from the dead takes between 6 months and a year”. That certainly put things in perspective.
I’d been home from the hospital for about a week when I emailed work to tell them I hoped to be back at my desk in two weeks (I wasn’t). At around 6 weeks off work, I started to feel really guilty about taking so long off sick. Bear in mind that at that point I still couldn’t wash or dress myself and my sentences began well enough, but then would trail off into silence at unexpected points. I was considered too unwell to start cardiac rehab yet. I couldn’t maintain enough concentration to be able to read and I’d forgotten the other things that I liked to do. So mostly I slept. I slept for 10-12 hours at night and during the day rarely got beyond the first 15 minutes of a television programme. A few times I fell asleep while I was having a conversation.
My short-term memory was shot, and my long-term memory wasn’t far behind it. I couldn’t concentrate for long enough to remember if I was upset or depressed. My world came down to the armchair, the bed and the pills. A lot of pills.
After I’d been home for a couple of months one of my work colleagues emailed me with the NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) stats for surviving a cardiac arrest. They weren’t great: “Fewer than 1 in 10 people survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Around 7–8% of people in whom resuscitation is attempted survive to hospital discharge.”
My ignorance protected me from fear and depression. So not knowing stuff turned out to be helpful as it meant I couldn’t overthink things. I had no idea that the new weirdness of my life was brain damage, caused by the time that my brain had been starved of oxygen during my cardiac arrest. All I knew was that I was “incredibly lucky”, and I knew that because by now I had some new people queuing up to tell me that, work colleagues, friendly visitors, family members and rehab nurses on the phone.
And now it’s almost exactly a year since my cardiac arrest and people say they can’t tell there’s ever been anything wrong with me. I’m still not allowed to go swimming and I have to factor my life around how incredibly tired I get, but apart from that I’m acing the recovery thing.
Then today a nurse (there’s still a lot of nurses in my life) said to me “So now you’ve got a second crack at life, what are you going to do with it” and I replied, “I’m going to write”. So here I am and here is the writing and, to be honest, I am feeling very lucky to be able to share this with you.