June 21 was an interesting day. National Aboriginal Day got renamed National Indigenous Peoples Day. It was the longest day of the year. The weather was beautiful, the sun was shining. In a few days, Canada will celebrate its 150th birthday.
But for me, it was an ominous, yet important anniversary. Five years ago on that day, I checked into the Regina General Hospital cardiac care unit, and later that night, I started showing the signs in my bloodwork of a pending heart attack. The next morning, Dr. Goerge Garbe and Dr. Jeff Booker performed an angiogram and angioplasty, opening up a blockage that was something like 99 per cent in the largest artery in my heart.
When all was said and done, there was damage to my heart, but thankfully, they caught it in time.
My late sister Melanie, a registered nurse, had taken a copy of my heart scans to her friend, a cardiologist in Saskatoon. One look at that and that cardiologist said I had a “widowmaker” in my chest. I guess being diabetic for 25 years to that point will do that to you. I was 37.
Thankfully, my wife, Michelle, is not a widow just yet.
Curiously, Dr. Booker was featured in the Leader-Post a day before my anniversary. Dr. Booker just got funding to perform a new heart procedure within Saskatchewan. Seeing the story online brought back a flood of memories.
I’ve written about that scary time before. But I haven’t written much about what goes through your head afterwards.
I’ve always had a hard time going to bed. Rarely do I ever crawl into bed before midnight, and often much later. But in the months after I got out of the hospital, there was another reason. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that I wouldn’t wake up. How could I sleep, if today might be the last day?
For the first few weeks, I couldn’t walk down the street half a block to get my mail, and back, without needing a two-hour nap afterward. I most definitely had heart damage, as Dr. Garbe explained. Slowly, over the years, my strength returned, and I don’t get nearly as winded today as I did even two years ago. I’m nowhere near my earlier strength and endurance, but I’m not bad.
One of the things Dr. Garbe explained when asked about my fear of bringing on a second, fatal heart attack was that hard exercise would most likely be the trigger if that were to ever happen. As a result, I have hardly worked up a sweat in five years. Maybe I could? I’m a lot better now. But there’s an underlying fear that if I push myself, that’ll be it, so I don’t. Join a gym? I don’t think so.
This past year, I haven’t been getting nearly as much exercise as I should be. For me, that means walking. I’ve also found that a “heart healthy” diet is next to impossible to follow when you are eating out. There might be one or two items on a menu, and that’s about it. It’s hard not to think, “Will this be the burger that kills me? Will it be a Teenburger or Big Mac?”
To this day, I still wonder if this will be the last time I hug my kids, or go to their ball game, or kiss my wife. While my own sense of mortality is not nearly as ever-present as it was in the first two years, it lingers – always, everywhere.
I’ve found myself trying to impart fatherly wisdom on my kids now, probably earlier than one would otherwise, because I’ve always got that thought that there might not be time to do it later. I’m also trying to do this as much as possible before the hellish teenage years cause strife. Right now, my kids still like me.
But I keep thinking my kids could have lost their dad at ages five and eight. And that thought is never far from my mind. It gnaws at me when I yell at them, for the sixth time, to come for supper, or to clean their rooms. Why am I yelling? (Because they didn’t listen the first five, increasingly vocal, times). Don’t they know that I’m always thinking that I might not have been here to tell them to come for supper?
Two years ago, Melanie committed suicide. Didn’t she know I was supposed to go, not her?
In the days after I had my angioplasty, my neighbour at the time told me he had a heart attack 27 years before. He was putting his golf clubs in his SUV for another 18 holes. That, more than anything, gave me hope that tomorrow won’t be the end, and neither will Tuesday. (Don’t ask me that on any given Monday, however.)
If Ed could make it another 27 years, hopefully, I will, too.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
