When I was in my mid-twenties I had several concerning but not alarming incidences when I would wake up in the middle of the night with my heart beating rapidly. Not the kind of rapidly you experience after going for a run, or being scared by something. Just out of nowhere, racing, with an accompanying feeling of fear; it wasn’t fear about anything specific in my life, only that I wouldn’t be able to get the episode to stop and maybe something bad would happen, medically speaking. Sudden death, for instance.
I mean, not really. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, where logic presides, I knew I was alright. This was confirmed by a doctor I saw about the issue, who suggested that what was happening to me sounded very much like classic panic attacks. While I’ve never considered myself an unduly stressed out person, this diagnosis made some sense.
For one thing, around that time my father had suffered a minor heart attack and accompanying surgery. He was doing just fine after the fact. In fact, he was doing great, watching what he ate and boasting to us about how many miles he’d walked that day according to the odometer he’d taken to wearing. “Point eight miles, because I parked farther away than I needed to!” he’d exclaim. I was proud of the way he’d turned his experience into the proverbial “lemonade,” making friends at the rehab class he attended post-bypass and embracing a healthier lifestyle.
But maybe I was internalizing stress about his health and these probably-panic-attacks were the result. They didn’t happen often and when they did I was able, as the doctor suggested, to make my way through them with deep breathing, or sometimes laying my head against the cool tile of the bathroom wall. I was back to normal minutes later.
I never worried about this bodily quirk, but over the past year or so the episodes returned, a little more aggressively than they had in the past. I’d wake up a couple times a month with my heart racing, pressure in my chest, or both. As always, I’d take deep breaths, walk around the bedroom for a few minutes. Sometimes I’d think – weirdly calm about it all – “The hospital is a mere 15-minute drive away if this situation goes south.”
I’d stood by the stress diagnosis all those years, a diagnosis which still made a lot of sense. The last time these “attacks” had begun was right after my father was hospitalized for a heart issue, and this time they’d begun shortly after he died of cancer. In the weeks and months that followed that major life event, J got a new job, I left a job, we bought a house, sold a house, moved and our children started at a new school.
I’d briefly seen a therapist for the first time in my life, explaining to her that I just felt, “I don’t know, really overwhelmed, to the point where I don’t want to do any of the little or big things that would help me stop being overwhelmed.” She’d helped me clarify my worries and suggested how to address them in the very first visit and I was ready to stop seeing her within three, despite the fact that I discovered I really like talking about myself. But when I sat there during our third session, telling her how great everything was, she gently noted: “You seem ok. Are you ready to stop?” and I agreed that I was, and that if I started feeling less so I’d come right back.
Because I love to waste medical professional’s time with hundreds of questions, I asked her if it was normal to feel better after so few visits. She assured me this was perfectly normal for some people, and I felt very lucky to be “some people.”
(Just a short PSA that if you’ve ever thought about going to therapy for any reason, I highly recommend it. Big problems or seemingly small, it doesn’t matter. If you can feel better, then you deserve that.)
Back to the point, I still felt, still feel, like a fairly even-keeled person, not prone to bouts of intense stress.
Yet, if a person was going to have anxiety attacks, the life events I’d experienced from the summer of 2017 to the fall of 2018 would kind of do it, I figured.
I considered other explanations, however, and repeatedly told J that I should probably go back to the doctor about this, just to rule out anything serious. I could be having “tachycardia,” which refers to an abnormally rapid heartbeat that some people are susceptible to (my father had been prone to this, as well) and is usually harmless. Or maybe it was initial symptoms of thyroid disease, which runs on my mom’s family. (Families! They love to give you predispositions for things!)
Or maybe I had an undiagnosed defect that would render me dead one of these days without warning. Probably not, sure, but I’d done some writing for a national non-profit that works with hospitals a few months prior, profiling children diagnosed with a range of diseases, and internalized some of what I’d learned in the process, an unfortunate side effect of writing about rare medical conditions for hours on end. Did I have a potentially fatal heart malformation that had somehow never been identified by a professional? I doubted it, I really did, but I could, I now realized.
Stress, or something more sinister, it did not occupy my thoughts except when it was happening – an annoyance really – and I’d go through the steps. Deep breaths. Cool tile. The hospital is only a short ride away.
***
We are getting much better at them but weekday mornings are not our family’s strong suit. This is a common problem, I know. Getting young children out of their beds, into weather-appropriate clothes, into clothes at all – into pants when it’s below 40 degrees and you won’t be mortally harmed by wearing shorts, I get it, but all the other parents will be judging me GABRIEL – with packed lunches in their backpacks and permission slips signed last-minute.
There are so many ways to alleviate the madness, like packing up and picking out clothes the night before, which we are slowly – snails-pace-slowly – incorporating into our routine, making mornings run more smoothly. Simple preparedness is one of those proven methods in parenting, really in anything. And still? Still, sometimes we forgo the evening preparations in favor of Netflix. Sometimes = often.
The upcoming morning rush was what I was thinking about when, a few weeks ago, I had another one of my never-that-scary-probably-anxiety-possibly-near-death-episodes in the middle of the night. This one, though, this one was different in that there was no rapid heartbeat, just pressure, and accompanying finger numbness in my left hand. I was perplexed. I knew that should I Google my symptoms – something you all know you should never do and which I haven’t done since the ovarian cancer scare of 2006 (which in re-reading really explains a lot) - the search result would be something about a life-threatening condition and calling an ambulance.
And the thing is I knew, with 99 percent certainty, that I was not having a heart attack, or other kind of attack, or dying. I knew with that same certainty that what I was experiencing was most likely physically harmless, perhaps simply caused by the worries that subconsciously haunt us while we sleep.
But I thought about my children and gave myself the same advice I’d give anyone experiencing this type of situation: you should go get checked out.
So I woke up J and told him what was going on and that I thought I should probably head to the emergency room although I really, really did not want to subject myself to that experience in the middle of the night. I told him that I didn’t feel alarmed or scared and that I could even drive myself there, but that if something serious was happening I’d never forgive myself for not going.
And then, because we parents are creatures of logistics, I made sure he’d be able to handle all the morning details himself. Confirming that he’d be able to get everyone to school and to work on time was one of the worries I had about leaving the house for what would inevitably a multi-hour health crusade, probably dealing with an overcrowded and “exciting” scene in the waiting area when I could, instead, stay in my warm bed, possibly, but probably not, dying.
Of course that would be just fine, he said, after asking if perhaps my symptoms were due to the late afternoon cappuccino I’d had the day before plus watching the stressful Netflix documentary “The Keepers” – which is about murder and sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests, and you all should totally watch it – just before falling asleep?
In retrospect, yeah, maybe! But in the moment I considered more daunting “what ifs.” So I got up and drove myself downtown.
***
The hospital felt a little like a spa. This is a crazy thing that can happen when you have kids or a busy life in general: places that are decidedly not spas feel like them (the dentist, a quiet bathroom stall, a solo elevator ride).
I used to try and convince myself that if the dentist felt relaxing, that was evidence I really needed to find more time for myself, and I’d scold myself for not booking that necessary self-care. But I don’t do that anymore. It is important to make time for yourself, but I’ve also learned to own the unexpected versions of it. If the dentist equals peace for me, so be it, and if a trip to the emergency room in the middle of the night was a tranquil getaway, whatever. I mean, there were no relaxing lavender scrub treatments, but it was surprisingly quiet – almost no one in the waiting area – the providers were efficient, compassionate and didn’t even remotely make fun of me (at least to my face) when I walked into the emergency room, clearly not experiencing a real emergency, and told them that I had pressure in my chest and numbness in my fingers and was pretty sure I was just fine, but what if I wasn’t?
They did a full work up and then some. I had an EKG, and was wheeled to radiology for an x-ray. Wheeled there! In my little gurney like some kind of queen! I told the guy who took me that my kids sure didn’t do stuff like that for me, and he didn’t say anything back (my PA, however, hours later, told me I could order lunch and stay an extra hour if I wanted to enjoy the “day off”; she really got me). I was transferred to the “Chest Pain Center” where a cardiologist went over some of the potential diagnoses and procedures they could perform. I could be experiencing any number of things, from typical stress to a blood clot. Their job was to make sure my body, and especially my heart, was healthy.
The verdict? It is. During a stress test on a treadmill, my nurse, who was taking my vitals throughout the process, and who I’d bonded with complaining about the lottery that dictates placement in New Haven’s school system, and another provider, who was observing my physical responses on a nearby computer, asked if I wanted to take this thing up to the highest level, being a runner and all? And I was like HELL YES I DO, I DIDN’T COME HERE FOR NOTHING.
So we did. And I aced it. Well, except for the very end when I was feeling self-congratulatory as we all joked that I was “certainly getting my exercise in for the day” – my hospital gown ballooning around me, my sweatpants, for once in their long career, actually sweaty, and my hair flattened around my face – and I suddenly got a little light headed and told them that, ok, I was all done. I’d been up since like 2 a.m., had had nothing to eat or drink since then, and they concurred that I’d put in my time. And that my heart’s performance on the EKG, x-ray and stress test was excellent.
