Pico de Orizaba

Pico de Orizaba
Taken from Huatusco, Veracruz, the closest town to Margarita's family's ranch.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Rupture in the Hour Glass

When we were breakfasting at 12:30pm, José "Montaña" sent Margarita a message asking her what our plans were for my birthday and I responded that at this moment I couldn't plan for my birthday... that I had just had a very bad experience the past few days...  So, he and Mary came over...  

What I believe you don't understand (nor does the cardiologist) is that, although I am alive today, both nights I felt my life slipping away...  I didn't feel that on March 14th with the reaction to the image resonance ink...the convulsions and my heart rate going from 68 to 200. Nor did I feel that on Mercer Street that summer in 1988...  As I said to José, it's as if that space between the two sides of the hour glass widened, allowing the sand to drain at an unprecedented rate.  It was a different type of falling...  If the ambulance didn't come fast enough... But, the ambulance wasn't going to come fast enough... It was too late...

Monday night, the breathing exercises didn't work.  Infact, they made my hands become numb...  I became very cold.  Margarita had to wrap me in blankets...  She said that holding my hands was like holding her 87-year-old grandfather's hands the month before he died.  

But you are only 45-years-old! How can this be happening to you?

José says that the problem I have is that my heart has always been too big... That I've always worried too much about the injustices that other people suffer... That I want to help people with the information that I obtain.  But no one wants to listen...  I absorb the pain others feel or I feel too much pain from the injustices I see...  In turn, my heart gets damaged...  

It's a poetic interpretation.  

He supposedly sees spirits or ghosts... maybe it's because he is blind in one eye (two failed cornea transplants)...  At the moment that Margarita wrote him to come over, he says he was visited by a woman... He says that the woman was related to me...  In our house he said that she was with him again...  He says that it was your mother.  Now why would your mother visit us?  Almost 8 years earlier, when we first met, he said that he was visited by your father...

Some time during the visit, he asked me to sit down in one of our sofa chairs, relax and close my eyes.  He did something with chimes from one air to the other... And then I thought he had his hand over my head... and then I thought he had something hot next to my left air, like the flame of a candle or a light bulb.  And that heat continued next to my ear until the exercise ended... (long after he had sat down to observe me) so did that sensation of a hand directly over my head... But suddenly I heard his footsteps moving away from me.  But, the sensation continued over my head...  It turns out that he was sitting in the love seat facing/observing me and my painting of the trees behind me the whole time.  He said that normally the son's faces look more like their mothers, than their fathers... But, with my head tilted slightly backwards, he was seeing my father more than my mother... and that my father gave me the energy to accomplish what he couldn't accomplish...  But that I was hurting myself because I couldn't take a break from the investigations and worrying about others...  that I needed to take a break... and that he needed me to bury him one day...  During the time in the chair, I fell asleep momentarily and I heard someone in the briefest dream say "pinche Joe"...  And I wondered who was Joe...  They weren't talking about José because no one knows José as Joe...  Joe Stankevitz?  I doubt it... And I wondered what other Joe's I've known in my life... And then I remembered Aunt Jo...  A moment later, I felt a strange tremor/sudden shaking in my chest, like that strange mattress jumping feeling that occurs sometimes right after you fall asleep.  And, suddenly light seemed to shine on me... But, more like as if the person standing next to me had moved away allowing the light from the window or the sky to reach me, removing their shadow...  And I asked if the sun had come out momentarily and José, Mary, and Margarita all said that it has been the same cloudy sky as always... and that José has been sitting in the love seat the whole time...  

José asked me also if I had felt pain in my left ear the past few days.  I responded no... So he asked me if I had felt pain in my left shoulder... And I said, "Yes, yesterday I awakened with pain in my left shoulder"... And chose to ignore it or hope that it was from the rowing maching workout Sunday afternoon...  And he said that he had been sensing this about me earlier...  

I wasn't frightened by the heart attack or the experience in the hospital March 14th... I was de-animated...  I was frustrated...  So, I waged a war against the situation.  I refused to be apathetic...  I had to prove that there was a misinterpretation of what had just occurred.  It just didn't make sense.  I knew it was something else and I had to figure out how to recuperate the project that was momentarily interrupted...  The cardiologist showed absolutely no signs of being able to help me with my concern.  So, I must seek the information and the tools outside of his consulting office...  And that's what I did for 3.5 months... And I educated myself on aspects of health and the body I previously had no inspiration for learning about... About heart attacks and atherosclerosis and all possible causes... 

In the process, something went wrong.

Wrong with my procedure?  Wrong with my behavior?

When I visited with the wonderful Endocrinologist on Monday, she said, "Wow! You really came prepared!"  Meaning that I greatly understood metabolic issues or processes... Meaning that we could have a conversation without her having to explain everything in detail...  I showed her the photo taken of me before removing the refined carbs
With my inlaws working in our coffee bar in May, and on the beach in Sayulita 2 years earlier
etc and explained that Margarita (who was there with us in the consultation room) lost the same amount of weight in the same time... and she, the endocrinologist exclaimed, "You look so much older in the photo!  The two of you really are gorgeous!  That's really impressive what you were able to do for the two of you!"  

I hadn't consulted with a dietician or a nutritionist or a gym trainer for changing our diet and lifestyle... In fact, I had been investigating and investigating to no avail for quite a while before discovering the idea about changing our diet... The idea came from various sources... And I molded our diet around what I felt sounded logical and what didn't sound logical... which led us to removing all wheat products, all refined carbs, most sugar, 99% of industrial vegetable/seed oils, all alcohol, most canned goods, most jarred goods...  Most commercially packed meats and cheeses, including sandwhich meats (includes bacon, hotdogs)...  I didn't start taking supplements until after my heart attack... Truthfully, I didn't believe in them...

Yes, you heard me correctly, I didn't believe in them...  

But, tell me, how do you come to believe or disbelieve in things?  Why do you believe in God?  And why did I just spell the word with a capital G?

I wasn't going to write because of concern about the stress it causes me...  and I just felt a strange fleeting discomfort in my throat...  But that's all that was, no?  We've gotta believe in something... or not believe...  

The events of this past weekend (4 days) have left me shell-shocked.  On Monday I wrote on my Facebook wall, "I almost died last night. But I didn't... Now I'm "afraid of the dark"... I had no idea that we would repeat the experience that night... 

But I was writing about believing in things... wasn't I?  

What I believed about Margarita and my future the day before the heart attack changed greatly after the heart attack... However, although I became disanimated about planning for the future after the heart attack, I still believed there was time for understanding what had actually happened.  It required a lot of work; a lot of investigations and learning about heart attacks and artery health or illness... how you prevent future heart attacks, if that is possible...  

Do you know that heart disease etc medications only prevent heart attacks in the first 6 months?  That over a 5 year period, the control groups end up having basically the same outcomes as the medicated groups?

So, what do we do with this problem?  

We try to figure out if having a heart attack truly means that we are worse off today than we were yesterday...?  Maybe so if I'm understanding the risks that come with having placed medicated stents placed in your heart arteries...  Who knows?  Maybe without the stents, it is possible to recover from a heart attack and be healthier tomorrow than we are today... But, pharmaceuticals do not do that for you.  They address the symptoms and not the causes...

Supposedly, if you understand the cause and if you understand the healing capacities of your body, if you are willing to hurt your body less through your lifestyle and habits and try giving it what it needs to function better, to heal itself, you can live as if you hadn't been seriously ill or damaged before...  And that was the premise of my work the past 3.5 months...  

No one was helping me.  The cardiologist NEVER asked for one blood exam during this period... He never asked me for my and my family's health history...  He didn't know that I had a history of asthma or allergies (especially to aspirin) before prescribing what he prescribed... And, when I told him about that history, he said that he didn't believe it really mattered... But if you look up the reasons why you shouldn't take the beta blocker Lobivon on Drugs.com, you'll read "If you have asthma or if you ever had asthma, you shouldn't take this"...  

Why not doctor?

But that's besides the point... and it seems that I'm rambling on...  

History changes itself...  Memories are conveniently erased.  Responsibilities become nullified or obselete when the person dies... And the whole mess is left to be disposed of by those left behind...  

Sunday night, Margarita and I went to bed... And we made beautiful love... Passionate love...  

}I'm prude... Always have been.  So, I feel embarrassed writing this... Although it's the truth and a very important detail for understand changes in events.  

And we fell asleep afterwards...  

I suddenly awakened with the need to go to the bathroom, but at the moment of lifting up my torso, I felt a pause in my heart... (Friday night I was awakened from sleep with my first bout of palpitations.  Every time I fell asleep, I would be awakened by a palpitation... I would awaken gulping for air seemingly in the hope that immediately inhailing would prevent the heart from stopping permanently.  It was a very frightening experience and had me in a panic for at least three hours while Margarita slept alongside me.  I practiced breathing exercises in order to keep the palpitations under control until I could fall back asleep)... so I lay back down and practiced my breathing exercises... but the palpitations continued coming, one after the other... And I felt my heart rate increase dramatically... and my hands became numb... and my tongue became dry... and I looked at Margarita asleep at my side and entered into a drastic debate with myself about whether or not should I awaken her... And I felt too weak to raise myself out of bed... And I suddenly concluded that I must awaken her, only to be fair.  So, I tapped on her shoulder.  My voice was very faint and I asked her to turn on the light... And with all the force I could muster, I made her understand that she should call the cardiologist... that we were in a grave situation... and that the ambulance wouldn't come on time...  

You have no idea... how it felt with my heart pumping increasingly faster... out of control..,. 

Out of control... It's as if we were two separate entities, my heart and my mind and body...  It was a train out of control...  And you still don't understand what I'm trying to share with you...  There would come a moment that, if I couldn't make my heart slow down, it would suddenly break.  But, this time, truly break...  overheat, burn out... Like an engine over-reved...  Pop! or Poof!, the engine block split... the food processor or blender won't turn on again...

Somehow I managed to sit up in bed... Maybe Margarita helped me sit up...  I managed to walk over to the sofa in our bedroom... And I managed to lower my pulse...  And I managed to walk downstairs and out the door and meet the paramedics...  who said that my blood/oxigen levels were perfect... from the breathing exercises... and that my BP was too close to normal for them to take me to the hospital...  That I should call a taxi.  I guess my breathing exercises worked wonders.  But, when I reached the hospital, my BP was supposedly at 189/115... so what happened between the visit with the Red Cross Ambulance Crew and the hospital? The ECG reading was normal... there was no sign of changes in my heart since the heart attack.  I hadn't had a heart attack...  Truthfully, I was left a bit frustrated and confused...  Especially since I found myself in a much closer near death experience than when I had the allergic reaction to the image resonance ink during the angiogram and stent placement March 14th...  And we went home... 5am and we didn't sleep... And we walked to the laboratory briskly as if we had drunk a few cups of strong coffee... at 8am and had blood tests done...  And didn't really sleep during the day... Met with the wonderful Endocrinologist that evening who sent me away with more tests to be done... I took my meds at around 9:45pm that night and proceeded to read the Pearl S. Buck book I was reading... but the palpitations came... And I went down to the kitchen to take my blood pressure and continue with the breathing exercises... 

At 2am Margarita awakened to find me at the computer writing certain people preparing for the event of my sudden death... Better than their not knowing why I stopped communicating... And I explained to Margarita what was occurring...  This time my heart rate was normal... But, my BP was rising rapidly... and breathing exercises didn't rid me of the palpitations or lower the blood pressure... and I started becoming very cold...  Margarita wrapped me in blankets, prepared me hot tea with cinnamon and cardomom and suggested I eat something... Recently I had read that cinnamon lowers BP... I had known about the BP lowering properties of Cardomom for a while... And had just read that Cayenne Pepper is used as one of the most effective natural ways of preventing a heart attack in the moment... So I told Margarita to bring me the Cayenne Pepper and a spoon...and proceeded to place spoonfuls of cayenne pepper in my mouth that I moistened with water...  Margarita also brought me a bucket and the hospital urinal..., since I suddenly developed a great urge to drink water and the need to urinate repeatedly... as if my body was trying to clean itself of something... (before ingesting the cayenne pepper). Afterall, I usually have difficulty urinating (not by blockage or kidney disease, but due to not having a colon or a rectum, nothing is reabsorbed in my non-existent colon).  

At 3am my blood pressure was 189/125...  At 9:30pm it had been at 125/85...Truthfully, I don't know how much higher it would go... I didn't want to know... I just sat there and tried breathing correctly.  But the breathing exercises caused my hands to become numb and I felt a strange warming sensation travelling down my arms... Margarita says that my hands and feet were horribly cold... So she started massaging my feet...  Fortunately, the cayenne pepper, cinnamon and cardomom dropped my BP to 140/89 by 5am... and I decided we could try and sleep... hoping that the palpitations wouldn't return upon laying down... And fortunately I was able to sleep undisturbed until 10am...

Today we basically know what caused the problem...  But I won't go into that...  My thyroid tests come back before Saturday... So, we'll have an idea how close I was to understanding the cause of the original heart attack... We're leaning towards a metabolic/hormonal/endocrine "disorder" and so far away from a question of diet and lifestyle... Meaning...

Why do you believe in what you believe?  Is it from personal experience?  Or is it because of what others have told you?  

When you experience your life slipping away so quickly and suddenly... out of the blue... and it occurs unexplained and two nights in a row... awakening you from your sleep, making you afraid to lay your head on the pillow and close your eyes... What will you believe in?

Death?  

Should we believe in death?

Before my heart attack and afterwards, I believed greatly in myself... I had learned to believe in myself through personal experience and impressive achievement against all odds the 12 years I'm living with and married to Margarita here in Mexico...  

But, my experience Sunday night and Monday night makes my belief in myself horribly irrelevent...  

And what if I hadn't learned about the cayenne pepper, cinnamon and cardomom for Monday night?  What if I hadn't learned about the breathing exercises for Sunday night?

What would have happened?

No need for believing in yourself if you are dead...  

And the cardiologist can't explain what happened the other nights... He doesn't know.  But, I will explain it to him... And he will understand later...  Why?  I didn't study medicine.  

The problem is that regardless of understandings or beliefs, we are racing against a clock... that seemingly speeds up with age.  But, the clock turned into a surreal hourglass and has shown me that at any given moment, it will suddenly decide to empty itself... regardless of what any of us understand or believe.

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