Love or Die Trying by Bob Ramsay

Author:Bob Ramsay [Ramsay, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781459747197
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2021-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

17

A Heart Goes Haywire

Two months after my surgery, Jean and I met with my cardiac surgeon, who pronounced my open-heart surgery a total success. There was a bounce in my step as we left his office, Jean walking up University Avenue to her clinic and me downtown to a client meeting, both of us relieved that life would now get back to normal.

I ducked in to the Hilton Hotel to the men’s room on the lower floor. Suddenly, my legs buckled. I grabbed ahold of the railing. What the hell was that?

I felt light-headed. My hands and jaw started to tingle. My lips grew numb. I turned around and pulled myself up the stairs to the main floor. I was damned if I was going to die alone in the men’s room in the basement of a hotel.

I walked unsteadily into the lobby and sat down. By this time, I was feeling dizzy, but I had to get out of there. So I got up and walked, one foot slowly in front of the other, outside. The doorman looked at me oddly. I was walking like a drunken sailor.

When I walked smack into a building, hitting my arm on the marble wall, I knew I was in trouble. I was having a stroke. I had to get to the hospital. It had to be Toronto General. They had all my records.

It was six blocks away.

Somehow, I managed to walk out onto the street and into on-coming traffic. I raised my hand and a taxi stopped right away. I got into the back and said, “Toronto General Emerg.”

The driver looked at me in his mirror: “Are you okay, mister?”

“I’m not sure.”

Three minutes later, we were at the front door of the largest emergency unit in Canada. I struggled out of the cab and managed to walk up to the reception. I blurted out, “I’m having a stroke.”

By now, I was pouring sweat and barely able to stand. Within one minute, two triage nurses got me into an examining room. There, they asked me if I could talk, if I was in pain, if I felt numb and where (“My hands, my jaw!”) and even the old standby, if I could spell the word world backwards. The waves of dizziness forced me to prop my head on the top of my chair as I tried to answer their questions.

The nurses moved me into an acute care cardio bed in the ER. They called Jean, who rushed over. Over the next three hours, all kinds of doctors, nurses, and technicians poked, probed, and questioned me. I felt better lying down, but the waves of dizziness and rapid heartbeat kept coming every fifteen minutes. I was terrified.

A couple of times in the months before my heart surgery I’d felt dizzy and had to sit down, and when Jean took my pulse, she had declared I was in atrial fibrillation. In other words, I had an occasional irregular heartbeat, with resulting palpitations and shortness of breath.

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