All the Little Things

"Hey, you've got your phone right? Take a picture of me."

"What?? Why?" my friend's horror at the suggestion was evident as I lay propped up on the emergency room bed with an assortment of wires and tubes fanning out from my body and head, connecting me to an array of beeping and blinking machines.

"Because right now I look pretty freaking great for a Borg!"

Humor. My built-in defense against the stuff I really don't want to think too deeply about. Shortly before I'd been trying to catch my breath and pondering the tight squeezing in my chest. Not pain exactly, but intense pressure and a feeling that I'd been revved up to super-light speed. Then the weakness and loss of focus came and I finally realized that lying down for a bit wasn't going to fix this.

I was feeling better because I was on oxygen and had been pumped full of drugs to slow my heart to a speed at which it could actually pump the blood around my body instead of fluttering empty with a pulse too fast to be measurable. Atrial Fibrillation with Rapid Ventricular Response it was, or in technical terms, a bum ticker. Doctor Oh-So-Young flung back the curtain and announced with obvious pride that he knew what was ailing me.

"You're hyperthyroid" It was one of the possible options he'd mentioned earlier as I was prodded and wired and stuck with sharp things and x-rayed. But it was the one I'd thought least likely.

"Well, Hell! Don't fix that!"

As I spoke he blinked blankly at me. Of course he didn't understand. He was young and male and had probably never dieted in his life, or even looked in the mirror without experiencing complete admiration for his reflected self. The first thing I associated with hyperthyroidism is being skinny, something I've never in my life been.

Needless to say, the medical profession insisted on trying to fix it. After three days in a cardiac ward, scans, tests and a trip to the endocrinologist, I was diagnosed with Graves Disease. It's really not so bad. I'm older than most people who develop this disease which must mean certain parts of me are younger than my physical age, right? The medication isn't outlandishly expensive and I have a great excuse to not do the heavy lifting or skip lunch.

My mother, when she heard about my unfortunate incident and diagnosis, was frankly incredulous. Apparently everyone in my family is supposed to have high cholesterol, high blood pressure and adult onset diabetes. It's the natural order of things and I just flew in the face of family convention by having perfect blood sugar levels and positively fantastic cholesterol. I do have high blood pressure but the doctors assure me that it's only because of the thyroid problems and if they can get that under control the blood pressure will go down. This was yet another piece of evidence to suggest that, no matter how much I look like my mother, I'm actually the result of some perverted mating between my father and an evil she-demon, foisted off on my mother to carry to term and look after as if I were almost her own. Um, anyway...

Looking back I realized that for months I'd had plenty of signs that something wasn't quite right. There was some weight loss. People had been telling me how good I was looking, so instead of actually finding out what was causing it, I preferred to believe I was just doing a good job of moderate eating. There was the rapid heart beat and breathlessness, but surely that was because I'd just moved from sea-level to a mile high and hadn't done enough exercise lately. I had, with great amounts of expended will-power, given up caffeine because of it. The weirdest sign was the constant choking on drinks. I was beginning to think that my throat had somehow forgotten how to work properly or intentionally malfunctioned during business meetings when I'd take a sip of water and end up coughing and spluttering with streaming eyes as if I'd tried to inhale the liquid. I had no clue that the insidious gland was ever so slowly crushing my oesophagus.

So there I was, thinking I was basically healthy and strong with just a few very minor, self-diagnosed, insignificant health issues. Nothing to worry about, nothing a good night's rest wouldn't fix. Then the Universe said...

"Well, actually..." WHOMP!!!

See, I forgot that, even when it's my own health, I don't know everything. I took the easy option and agreed with everyone else that losing weight must be a good thing even if I couldn't explain why. Always ask why. I forgot to pay attention to that nagging voice in the back of my mind that was telling me something had gone wrong. I didn't want to add up all those little things and see the big picture.

The specialist asked me why it was that I went to the hospital when I did. I told her that I just felt something really bad, like a heart attack or a stroke, was going to happen if I didn't go right then. She told me I wouldn't have survived if I hadn't gone in when I did. I didn't know I was in the process of actually having a heart attack of sorts.

It's a very strange thing to be told you were on your way out of this life. No, there was no "life flashing before my eyes" and no great revelation of things left to do. But I'll tell you I learned one thing in no uncertain terms...

Pay attention to all the little things!

HAP