“I went to a doctor in a nearby town and they did an ECG. A few days later, a doctor called and said he would like to talk to me about the result. The doctor came in and told me that I took a heart attack and they were sending me to a cardiac centre about 150 kilometres away.”
“The next thing I knew the air ambulance was coming and picking me up. I said, ‘Do you want to give me another heart attack? Putting me in a helicopter? I’m afraid of heights you know!’ I watch many disaster movies, so all I could think of was the door opening and the stretcher flying out! It’s a wonder I didn’t take another heart attack!”
“I am not sure when I took the heart attack. There was one night a few days before they did the ECG when I was so sore right in my chest and I couldn’t sleep. So I got up and came downstairs. I tried to sit and I tried to lie and didn’t feel much better. Maybe that was the night I was taking it. I don’t know. I just thought I had pulled a muscle.”
“The doctors said my heart was so damaged that I needed a transplant. That was 15 months ago.”
When I heard ‘heart transplant,’ I couldn’t remember anything else they told me. I just heard those two words and I couldn’t believe it.
“I live with my 95-year-old mother in this two-storey house in the small town where I grew up. Mom is blind but otherwise well.”
“We don’t have a family doctor. There’s a family doctor in town. I tried to get into him but I couldn’t; he wouldn’t accept any more patients. I tried to just get a vaccination and I couldn’t even get a needle from him. Even if I had a doctor, if something happens to me I’d be better just to go by ambulance to the hospital because I am not allowed to drive much.”
“I can only drive down the street. That’s as far as the heart doctor will let me drive. I can’t go to Renfrew or Pembroke. I can’t drive to get regular blood tests. That’s why the paramedics have been coming into the house pretty well for a year now, which is great. They do my mother’s blood tests too.”
“I am on the Canada-wide transplant registry. I am just sitting around waiting for the call. It’s starting to get to me because it’s been over a year. I want to have it done. But sometimes I think, ‘Well, I don’t know if I want to go through all that.’”
I am so frustrated because I can’t drive anywhere. The worst is not being able to do much. I can’t go visit anybody. I am trying to help mom.
“It’s just the two of us, you know? I have told mom, ‘Well, don’t you be out there working around the house!’ They will all be saying, ‘That poor 95-year-old is out doing the work!’ [laughter] I just feel so guilty that I can’t go out and do it. That’s what’s kind of getting me down right now.”
“What’s it like living together all the time?”
“Well, right now we’re getting on each other’s nerves [laughter]. I can’t get out. It’s the worst in the summer. It’s so nice out that you just want to go, even if it’s just to drive around. Winter is not too bad because it’s so cold you just hate to go out anyway.”
“When you have the transplant, who will look after your mom?”
“Mom had to be alone when I was in the hospital for two and a half months. My brother would come and do the banking and cut the grass, and my cousin would come down twice a week and make her meals.”
“Mom can’t read what’s on a can, so you have to kind of line up the cans for her. She can’t see the buttons on the microwave. She doesn’t like using the oven because one time something on the element started burning and she can’t see it if it starts burning. I sometimes think, ‘Well, geez, I can’t go right now. How is she going to stay here by herself?’”
Clara [her mom]: “Oh, she definitely will go! I will be looked after. My niece in Pembroke can help. She won’t be down every day, but I know the house. It’s home.”
Two months later after her post transplant:
“Now that I look back, I think, ‘Did it really happen?’ You wait so long, and then it comes so fast.”
“When the time came I wasn’t sure. I was so scared. I was sitting there thinking, ‘Oh God, I don’t know if I should do this! They are going to take my heart right out! I’ll be dead!’ But then you say, ‘I have to do it!’”
“When I first woke up the surgeon was there and I said, ‘Oh my God, it feels like my heart is going to beat right out of my neck!’ He said, ‘Don’t you worry, I sewed it in good!’ What a difference to feel the pulse in the tips of your fingers and to feel your heart beat! I was lying there, and it was just throbbing in my neck. At first I thought, ‘What is that? There’s something wrong here!’ I was so used to my blood pressure being 80 over something. Now it’s way up to 120 or 130.”
Donna post transplant
“I have to be on this intravenous drug for an hour a day for a while. The nurse who comes to my home to administer it is someone I really like. I used to work for her one time. But before I could leave the hospital, they had to see if the Ministry would fund this drug.”
I was getting so frustrated because I was healthy enough to go home, but I couldn’t. And finally after many days, it came through that it was funded.
“The first night I came home I thought, ‘Oh, I will sleep so good in my own bed!’ I slept for about two hours and then I was awake all night. I thought, ‘Oh my God, tomorrow is the first day I will be on my own! How will I remember to take my insulin, take all these pills?’ The first three or four days I thought I’d go crazy. I still don’t have a family doctor. I was arranging everything, phoning everywhere. There were four pills that the drugstore didn’t have. The hospital gave me enough for three days. So I called the drug store and said, ‘Will you have the pills for Tuesday morning? I need those pills!’”
“I was thinking, ‘Why am I doing this? I should be at home resting and relaxing. I shouldn’t have to arrange for pills to come here. This should be up to the hospital, the drugstores.’”
“Aside from these issues, it seems like a dream that the transplant happened. The people in the hospital were great.”
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