My fake heart attack!
A&E always exaggerate…
It was 2008/2009, when it all came to pass that something was not right. Everything was spinning around me. I fell to the floor.
I had been sat at my project management desk working on a dumb project for the Department of Trade and Industry. Stressed to bits. Working daft hours, work always on my mind.
I was in full hero mode complex. Only I could solve all the issues of my world then. The whole Project relied on me. Nobody else could manage.
The year before, in 2007, Lyla was born and I started to realise how I must have known my dad. Like I really knew him. Of course I knew him even as a baby. Why would I not know him? And at that point, I kinda knew that something wasn’t right.
Anyway, that day, the room was suddenly spinning.
My arms went numb. Couldn’t feel my legs.
I had a panic attack.
The ambulance took me to A&E. They hooked me up to lots of machines, gave me some oxygen. I remember one of my colleagues visiting me and looking at my face. She was pretty horrified by what she saw.
The doctor came back in and told me I’d had a heart attack. Inexplicably really.
Helen told everyone I’d had a heart attack, the calls came in to my hospital bed. Life was changed forever. Critical illness cover anyone? Heart attack in my early 30s, are you serious?
No.
False alarm.
“The A&E doctors always exaggerate!” That’s what the doctor on his rounds said the next day.
So what was happening?
This started a 6 month process of tests to try and understand what it was. Heart tests, scans, but nothing.
More Panic attacks ensued.
More A&E visits.
More mystery.
“I’m going take your glasses off you, said one lovely A&E doctor, as he tried to convince me to take anti-anxiety medication.
No chance, but I got his point (years later I happily take Sertraline and would recommend medication).
Until
2010 or so.
A chance visit to my GP who told me I should speak to their in house councillor.
The councillor a man I can barely remember now, who listened to me talk for an hour about my life and then said:
“Grief”
“You are grieving your dad.”
He was right.
The next stop was Mog, my therapist and a 4 year road of therapy, not a mountain.
