A Lenten interruption – Lent 2025: Day 38

For a couple of weeks I thought it was long Covid – a shortness of breath and tightness of chest during physical exertion (such as walking uphill) or exercise, which would abate as soon as I'd stop and rest. According to current medical knowledge, long Covid symptoms tend to disappear after between four and 12 weeks. So no great cause for concern, I thought. On Friday 4 April, during my daily walk, I’d feel that shortness of breath and tightness of chest come on strong. So I stopped, and I returned to feeling normal. This sensation returned several times during the first hour, but completely stopped during the second. The evening was spent exercising (usual sets) while listening to Yours Sinsouly with MJDJ on West Wilts Radio, and I went to bed normally.

At around 3am, I woke up feeling the shortness of breath and tightness of chest – not good, as I was at rest. This continued after I got out of bed at 7am prompting me to call Lux Med and arrange to see a doctor. After a diagnosis over the phone, I was told to rush myself into the clinic just off ulica Żwirki i Wigury, not far from Okęcie airport. Fortunately, I have Moni’s car and could get there in 45 minutes from the działka. I was given an immediate electrocardiogram test, which revealed a likely heart attack. 

An ambulance was called, and within minutes I was in cardiology department at Warsaw Medical University on ulica Banacha, having a coronogram of my heart. This was done by inserting a probe into the artery of my right arm, and shoving it up into my heart. This indeed revealed to be a heart attack (ostry zawał serca it says in the paperwork), caused by the muscles of the aorta blocking blood flow. So stents were fitted along the same arteries – three of them – balloons to hold open the chambers of the heart, and by 12:45, I was being wheeled out of the operating room and into the cardiac intensive care ward, a mere two hours after arriving at Lux Med. And there I’ve been from Saturday afternoon through to Thursday morning, plugged into the cardiac telemetry machine, which monitored my vital functions. I had blood tests, an x-ray of my lungs, an echogram and an ultrasound of my heart, and was hooked up to a Holter monitor for 24 hours. My final day was in the recuperation ward; I was released this afternoon.

So – a bit of a milestone!

And an answer to a question I'd been asking myself for decades: Have I got my father’s heart – or my mother’s heart? My mother had her first (of three) heart attacks at 58; my father only began developing heart issues (angina pectoris) in his 80s. My mother survived until the age of 88, my father until 96; his death certificate listed heart and kidney failure as the causes. My father at least ate a sensible diet and was mindful of the need of physical exercise; my mother ate too much cake, too many biscuits and sugar in general.  Her only exercise was the two miles she'd walk to work and back each day, so about 3,500 paces. And by coincidence, my heart attack happened on what would have been my father's 102nd birthday!

First days of the rest of my life

Physical decline doesn’t happen gradually – it happens in steps, with intervals of many years between each one. My last such step was eight years ago (summer 2017); since then it’s been an even keel – until now. After seven days in hospital, five of which were spent in intensive care, I've gotten used to the idea. 

"You can get used to everything"

My father – who survived the Nazi invasion of September 1939, the occupation, the Warsaw Uprising and prisoner-of-war camps before ending up as a refugee in a distant country – often said this to me: "do wszystkiego można się przyzwyczaić". Whatever change of circumstance destiny delivers, you will adapt. It’s just a question of time. From Covid to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and now Trumpian chaos, this decade has been dealing us blow after blow, and soon yet we get used to the new situation. And so it will be with my new cardiac situation. I am eager to see how it will impact on my exercise and diet regime.

Disassociation

“Through my head/Through my head/Rock'n'roll nurse goin' through my head/As I was lying on a hospital bed” – the lyrics of Bo Diddley’s Pills were going through my head as I was lying on the operating table. My body was shivering (I was wearing socks, underpants and a surgical gown), but my consciousness was calm. Should shit go wrong, I’m ready to drift away. This was nowhere near to a near-death experience or an out-of-body experience, just a sense of my consciousness disassociating itself from its physical container. Pleasant and familiar. Death, I fear you not. I had the same sense of a dissociated awareness moving along the silent hospital corridor at quarter to four this morning, the ultimate liminal space...

Hospital hypnagogia

I have swallowed more pills over the past seven days than in the last eight years. What are they? The pills don’t say. Something for blood pressure, certainly; the other ones? Maybe sedatives? I’ve been dozing off a lot, so quite probably. And in doing so, those hallucinations one gets in the moments before dropping off (hypnagogia) were more vivid. Here are four. A bearded giant, in a dark log hut, eating pine-cone soup from a large, stone bowl. [Image created by Google Gemini Imagen 3.0.]

An ancient wooden Światowid carving, each of its four faces being a distorted face of Trump. Then there was a vision of Alvin Lee, Ten Years After’s lead guitarist, wearing a maroon woollen jumper and denim flares, faded pale, rocking backwards and forwards, playing an air guitar – but old now; in his late 60s, with long, thinning grey hair. [This prompted me to check his Wikipedia page; “he died on 8 March 2013 from unforeseen complications following a routine surgical procedure to correct an atrial arrhythmia. He was 68.”] The military takeover: I hear a group of soldiers singing a marching song, marching in time, marching through a distant corridor of the hospital, their boots stepping in time with the tune.

And finally...

I cannot fault the Polish healthcare system as I have experienced it. Excellent care, excellent people, and I cannot even complain about the hospital food! Though it must be pointed out, that – Fridays excepted – avoiding meat in a Polish hospital is impossible, as chicken and ham are on the menu daily. 

Well, home now, and ready to live the rest of my life. 

Lent 2024: Day 38
Neither a Follower nor a Leader be

Lent 2023, Day 38
Go with the flow, or swim against the tide

Lent 2022: Day 38
When I was a child, I understood as a child

Lent 2021: Day 38
Will we ever understand what's inside the atom?

Lent 2020: Day 38
Religion, Society and the Individual