Let's Take Part II First, Shall We?

Human emotions befuddle me.  Maybe it’s just my own emotions, but I’d like to share the confusion with all of my species.  Emotions make no sense, and yet they hold our mortal mini-universe together.  They tie us to one another and divide us asunder.  They split our sides with laughter and break our hearts into tiny shards.  They are manageable, but never truly controllable; as soon as we stifle one emotion it just pops up in another way, generally messier and more virulent than if we had just dealt with it in its pre-gremlin form. The passage of time often softens the edges of emotions, and hopefully that will be the case today, affording more clarity and less drama to my words.

A month ago, John had a heart attack.  I’ve been trying to write about it nearly all this time – when I haven’t been taking walks with him or cooking for him, or running errands or trying to pretend that life hasn’t kind of changed around here.  He’s fine.  As a matter of fact, if you want to know all the details of his latest adventure, that will be my next post. Technically, that's Part I, but I needed to do this first.  Every time I tried to write that, I ended up writing this, and this isn’t that, but something altogether different.

This is about how I feel.  About how I felt.  And I think it’s kind of weird, actually, because in that moment four weeks ago, I didn’t feel anything at all. 

He interrupted my lunch break at work; I was at my computer when he came in.  As I told him to lie down and tried to find him an aspirin, I felt irritated with myself for not having an aspirin on me and I felt foolish for not having renewed his nitroglycerin prescription for over three years.  Who even knows where that old bottle is?  At home in a dresser drawer?  Maybe.  So hard to say.

As we tried to decide what to do – he wanted me to call his doctor – I was firm but not afraid.  No, I wasn’t making a phone call.  Once he mentioned pain under his left arm, there was only one option, and that was going to the hospital.  His choices were having me drive him there or calling the ambulance. He asked me to go get the car, and all I felt was impatient – it was taking too long to walk/jog/run/(huff, huff)/okay,-just-walk-really-fast to the car.

The department chair asked if I was okay, there in the office, and I assured him that I was; I tend to fall apart when things are over, not in the middle of a crisis.  I know this about myself after many outings to the emergency room with children in various states of distress and blood loss.  I don’t freak out at the sight of blood.  Emergencies spur me to action.  I don’t have to think about it, and I wasn’t thinking about it four weeks ago.

I did feel relief when I saw the Emergency Vehicles pull up to the building at the exact same moment I did.  I was even a little annoyed when the ambulance took the last parking space there.  I had planned to park there and had to pull further down the road and turn around.  I began to feel really impatient when I realized there was no place else to park, so I parked illegally behind the ambulance, flipped on my flashers and handed the keys to my department chair who was waiting outside for me to arrive at the building.  I didn’t even care what he did with the car.

I didn’t feel panic, though, even with six or seven EMTs swarming over my husband like winged ants in the spring.  I always had thought the chair’s office was large, but it was bursting at the seams with all those people.  I felt surprise when an EMT pulled me aside and asked which hospital we wanted to go to, especially when he recommended a different one than I mentioned because of their superior facilities for by-pass surgery.  I figured he knew more about what was going on than I did, so I agreed to the new venue.

I wasn’t even afraid in the ambulance; in a detached kind of way, it was cool to ride in an ambulance and watch the EMTs do all the things in real life that I watched them do on a TV screen.  It was just like that, except that John was talking and when he wasn’t twisting and turning and trying to find a position where his elbows didn’t hurt, we were kind of joking with Eric the EMT and telling him about stuff like soccer and teaching Spanish. Okay, so maybe I was feeling a little nervous – that tends to make me chatty.

I did feel impressed when Eric the EMT laid down a second IV in John’s arm while the ambulance was going over bumpy roads and John didn’t even flinch.  For those of you who know John, his long and uncomfortable medical history and the hate/hate relationship he has developed with all things needled, you might also feel impressed. 

Until we arrived at the hospital, there had been precious little time to feel anything, to tell the truth.  I was annoyed that they wouldn’t let me stay with him in the ER, but I used the time to send some quick text messages to the kids.  Because I didn’t really know what was happening, I couldn’t say much, and that was frustrating, but it felt good to do something - anything active.  Sending a text was something I could do, and it didn’t require me to answer questions I had no answer for.  When they wheeled John out of the ER for the cath lab I followed, wishing I could be walking next to him, touching his head or his arm like I had been able to do in the ambulance, wanting to talk to him and tell him I was right there; that I wasn’t going anywhere.  All I could do was follow him down the hall, walking with the nurse who took me to the waiting area.

Sitting in a hospital waiting room is an unfortunate opportunity to feel stuff you may or may not feel like feeling.  A few more texts kept me occupied, but I found myself treacherously close to feeling something that resembled helplessness as I sat there.  I was so grateful to have a distraction when my department chair appeared in the waiting room doorway a little while later – he had arrived with my car and sat and visited with me while he waited for the associate chair to arrive to pick him up and take him back to campus.  When she arrived, the two of them just sat with me and talked . . . about the kids, about our summer plans; I don’t remember what, but I remember that I felt comforted and relaxed.  Their gift of time and listening was a precious one.

A doctor came in – a stranger I’d never met before nor since.  I can’t tell you his name.  He announced that John had had a heart attack; they had removed the blood clot and put in a stent to support the weakened artery, and John was resting.  Then he left.  I didn’t know what to feel or think.  I couldn’t ask questions -- there was no one to answer them, or walk me through this new territory.  Mike and Leslie looked at me, as stunned and confused as I was.  How did so much happen in so little time?  It didn’t feel real.

Over the next forty-eight hours, all I really felt was tired.  Sleep was spotty and not very restful.  I remember waking up after my second night on the fold out cot in John’s hospital room, my only thought being that I would give anything in the world just to be able to fall back to sleep. 

So when did I finally feel something?  When did I acknowledge the fear and the panic and the desperation?  Because they were all there, these drama-queens of emotion.  They sat in the wings and waited until they could have their own moments in the spotlight.  What was odd was their choice of time and place to debut.

For example:  two days after John was admitted, we were hoping we’d get to go home soon, and I remembered that I had left my insurance card in the emergency room when we first arrived.  I took a walk across the hospital to retrieve the card, which they had in a little box by the front desk – so simple.  As I turned to leave, I stopped and turned around and walked back to the desk to thank the young man who had helped me.  As the words came out of my mouth, I felt emotion rising in me like molten lava.  I smiled and turned and hurried away from the desk and down the hall as far as I could before Vesuvius erupted. 

It was a beautiful, sunny day outside and I stood in the glass-walled corridor looking out on the courtyard garden, grateful there were no people there to witness my meltdown, and grateful for a sturdy window frame to lean against during it.  A few minutes later, I had regained enough composure to walk back to John’s room in the ICVU.  We went home that afternoon. 

My next emotional moment is really only significant because of its similarity to the first.  I baked some cookies to take to the crew at the campus Emergency Service Dispatch.  It’s kind of silly, I know, ridiculous really to thank the people who saved my husband from a heart attack with sugar-and-fat-laden-treats, but flowers seemed weird, and I couldn’t really afford to send each of them to Cabo San Lucas to show my appreciation.  Cookies seemed a safe middle ground.  I especially wanted to thank Eric the EMT, who I had learned (doing a little online research) was the chief officer of the unit.  The building is less than two blocks from my office, so I took the foil-wrapped plate and walked over on my lunch hour the next Monday.  Eric wasn’t there; I was disappointed, but told the EMTs in the office who I was, thanked them for their wonderful service, and left the cookies.  The crew didn’t seem to be cholesterolly offended by my offering, and I headed out the door to walk back to my office. 

That’s when wave two hit me.  It might be important here to let you know that I’m not afraid to cry.  I believe in the value of tears and all their chemical and hormone releasing super powers.  I’m not embarrassed about it, even though I look disgusting after (and during) a good sob-fest.  I just prefer to do it in front of close friends and family or when I’m by myself.  Walking across campus on a bright and sunny day with tears gushing down my face does not feel inconspicuous to me.  At least this time I was steady enough on my feet that I didn’t need to stop.  Once back at my desk, I could hide behind the computer screen until normalcy returned.

What I think is so odd is that in both cases, my tears (emotional response and release) were triggered by the act of expressing my gratitude to others.  Why is this?  Was it the act of humbling myself to offer thanks to someone else that made me feel so vulnerable?  Was it the recognition that my world and security and balance of life had been placed in the hands of total strangers, who had acted with kindness and professionalism, and in that way had made my life easier at a very trying time?

I don’t know the answer, but I keep fiddling around with the question because I suspect there are clues in there to bigger things than what the triggers are for my tears.  What is this mystery of emotion that connects us all as human beings on this planet?  Why do we need each other so much?  How is it that we can comfort one another so completely with the simplest of acts?  How can kindness, that meekest of all human gifts, be so majestic and potent and ripe with impact?  And why would we ever think to mock such meekness?  Because we do.  We call meekness weakness.  Humbling ourselves is something we only do when we are compelled to do it.  And we aren’t grateful nearly enough.  We take so much credit for ourselves, and offer so little credit to others.  Or maybe it’s just me.  Or maybe it was just me.  Me before this latest change of hearts.