The Voices Inside My Head: Angels?

The Background
October of ’05 was my annual physical.   My doctor told me my cholesterol was too high and my blood pressure was too high as well.  It was time to take stock.  I had spent the majority of my life smoking too much, drinking a bit too much, and exercising a bit too infrequently, and it had caught up with me.  My wife is an echocardiographer who deals with the consequences of those excesses so she quickly laid down the law:  strict diet and increased exercise.  I really had no choice but to comply.  A year of healthy eating and a year of starting every morning with a half hour on our treadmill had me feeling pretty confident that I was well on the way to great health.

The Voices
It was the morning of October 11th, 2006.  5:00 AM.   I got on the treadmill and began trotting along with the incline setting steep as usual, when my triceps began to ache ever so slightly.  I initially figured that it was because I hold on to the arm rests while going uphill.  In any case, I slowed down and eventually stopped my jog about ten minutes early.  My alert wife heard the treadmill stop earlier than expected and she immediately came in from our adjacent bedroom.  By then, I was off the treadmill and the dull ache in my arms had subsided.  I brushed it all off as nothing to worry about but she grilled me for a few minutes before reluctantly letting me proceed to the shower.  I shaved, got dressed and was headed for the door when she again questioned me about how I was feeling.  I was fine.  I hopped in the car and headed to pick up the school teacher that carpooled with me.  Her home is about three miles from mine and the drive there was uneventful until I arrived at the turn at the base of the big hill atop which she lived.  As I made the turn, I began to hear a veritable cacophony of voices in my head, all speaking at once:  “This could be serious”…  “You’d better get this checked out”…” It would be no big deal if you missed work today”… “Better safe than sorry”…  “Don’t be foolish”…”Come on - go back home”… “Don’t take a chance”… and the voices continued until I was a couple hundred feet from her dooryard, when I said, out loud “You’re RIGHT!”  When I got to her house, I rolled down the window and told her that I wasn’t feeling all that well and that I was going to stay home from work that day… and I drove back home.  My wife was still getting ready for work when I walked back in the house and after a few moments of discussion during which I admitted that, maybe, that pain in my arms had not completely gone away, we were off to the Emergency Room.  It was now about 7:15 AM.

The ER
Processed… triaged… taken to a little cubicle behind a curtain…hooked up to an EKG Machine….zip zip zip.  A doctor came in, read the EKG strip and said that it appeared normal.  I explained that I had this very dull, non-specific aching in my triceps and an even less noticeable ache across the top of my chest.  He gave me a nitroglycerine pill and the pain immediately subsided.  That development concerned him.  He said, with a normal EKG, that shouldn’t have happened.  He recommended that I be admitted and have a series of tests the next morning, so off I went in the gurney to a hospital room and off my wife went to work.  It was now about 9:00 AM.

The Hospital Room
I had the far bed by the window… my roommate was an elderly man fast asleep.   I watched CNN on the little flat screen TV that rotated down in front of me… I got bored… and I fell asleep.  I awoke for lunch, if you could call it that… went back to the TV, and back to sleep.  I awoke about 2:30 PM with those same strange pains in my triceps.  I buzzed the nurse who suggested another nitroglycerine pill which sounded wonderful to me.  As he headed out of the room, he bumped into a cardiologist with whom my wife works.  The nurse headed toward the medicine chest, and the doctor headed towards my bed.  He was surprised to see me as he had not been in his office yet that day– where my wife would have told him of my situation.  He asked me to bring him up to speed and as I was just about finished with my tale, the nurse arrived with the nitroglycerine.  The doctor said, “No Nitro!  Get me an EKG on this patient STAT!”  And then, a minute or so later, as the EKG strip rolled off and the doctor read it, he said “Well [manfrommaine], you are getting ready to have a heart attack any minute!” It was now about 2:45 PM and things started happening very fast.

The Trip
I was rushed downstairs to a Cardiac Care station near the ambulance entrance.  Since the hospital in our town was not equipped for heart surgery, they were prepping me for the ride to Portland, Maine…over an hour away.  They hooked me up to IV’s and started all sorts of blood thinners and there were nurses and doctors running all around.  Within a few minutes, my wife and another cardiologist from their office arrived.  My poor wife looked ghastly with anxiety so I can imagine I looked much worse.  The ambulance came and off we went - me strapped into a gurney, an EMT and a cardiac nurse.  My wife was following behind in our car.  I was a bit frightened, but the three of us passed the time chatting and telling jokes – the one about “acute angina” sticks in my mind given how topical it was.  I think we were approaching Portland city limits when I lost consciousness.  I was only out for a short time because I vaguely remember them wheeling me out of the ambulance and into the hospital.  It was now nearly 5:00PM.

The OR
A full cardiac surgery team affiliated with our cardiac group was standing by, ready for me.  They flipped me onto an operating table.  They removed my slacks, and cut into my femoral artery… things get a bit fuzzy again but I do have vague recollections of activity and commotion around me.  After a time – not very much time, really – the surgeon said, “[mainfrommaine], do you want to see what we did?” He directed my attention to a big TV monitor and said, “Here is your heart before.  See how that black line is pulsing there and then it narrows and stops altogether?  That was your blocked Right Coronary Artery.  We put in a stent and opened it back up and now here it is.” and the monitor then showed the artery full sized and pulsing through its entire length.  I asked him what had actually happened to me, and he said, “You had a heart attack in the ambulance as you were approaching the hospital.  We were able to open your coronary artery almost immediately.  You are a very lucky man.”  I thanked him and was wheeled out of the OR and up to Cardiac Intensive Care.  It was 6:00 PM on October 11th, 2006.

The Aftermath
Blood tests done after the surgery revealed that, due to the rapid surgical response, I had not sustained any damage to any part of my heart muscle.  I was home from the hospital in three days and back to work in a little over a week.  If I had not listened to the cacophony of voices in my head, I would have driven to my office in a rural office park and had my heart attack at my desk, far from any ambulance and far from the nearly instantaneous, fortuitous responses of the cardiologists from my wife’s practice.  I would have died.  Whose were those voices?  There were many different ones – men, women, child-like voices… I hadn’t recognized any of them, but collectively, they had sounded so concerned… so full of care. They saved my life.    I have to believe they did so for some greater purpose.  I have to believe they were angels.