Attacks of the heart

So I am back in Sydney after a week in the midst of what one family member called our "multi-faceted drama". I will tell you about one facet of this drama.

On Friday 13th March I booked a ticket to fly home in response to the first facet. But then in the middle of that Friday night my older sister felt terrible, had a pain that started in her back and had what turned out to be a heart attack. This was quite a shocking surprise. However, it was a minor one as these things go and she was in hospital waiting for an angiogram on the following Monday, so at this point I didn't change my ticket. Then on Sunday morning she had another acute attack in the hospital and went in for emergency angioplasty, which I didn't find out about until I was at church. In all undramatic seriousness, had she not already been in the coronary ward of a hospital for this one she would no longer be on this earth.

So I bought another plane ticket and flew up last Monday. She was doing fine, because angioplasty, while a serious medical procedure, is not actually that invasive and you can recover quickly. They put stents in through your femoral artery and it is quite amazing technology. I don't think I have told blog world this, but one of the stranger jobs I have had in my life is actually working for the cardiologists for a time at one of the private hospitals in Brisbane. I did ECGs on people. I read patient files and listened to cardiology conversations. I've been there when a person went into ventricular fibrillation and we had a "code blue", the highest level of medical emergency—sirens go off and lights flash and people with machines come running. So, I know something about all this business—probably just enough to be dangerous. They put four stents (that is a lot) in one of my sister's arteries during this angioplasty. The thing about this second heart attack is that it was in a different place to the first. The cardiologist said "well I don't believe in coincidence but this is a separate event".

My sister was doing fine, all things considered, and due to come home on Thursday or Friday last week and so I kept my return ticket which was for Saturday. She did know, however, that there was a partial blockage with the artery that caused the first attack that she would need to come back about some time in the future. Then she caught some viral thing going around the hospital (either that or it was food poisoning, but other patients also had it) and couldn't go home on Thursday and was really not up to doing the stress test on the Friday, which was to test the functioning of that first partial blockage before she went home, and started complaining about more chest pain. Nothing, however, was registering on the ECG (but it hadn't in the first attack either) and the two cardiologists she had previously seen were not in that day. They also don't go in and do angiograms for chest pain only, because it carries risks. So it was quite a while before an abnormality registered on the ECG and they whisked her in for a further angiogram and plasty. They also thought the problem might be in the second artery and took a while getting to the blockage, which was actually that first one this time, and my sister said she nearly let go at this point because the pain went on and on and was excruciating (that from a person who had children with only happy gas—so you have it from her that there is a pain worse than child birth). This next angioplasty was complicated and then she was really quite sick afterwards and needed two blood transfusions to get her haemoglobin level back up and deal with an inexplicably low blood pressure. So I bought yet another plane ticket.

At this point you may well wonder why all this and be picturing a chain-smoking, junk-devouring couch potato. The truth is that my sister has never smoked a cigarette in her life, came first in NSW in Homescience when she did it for the HSC (which is all about nutrition and the properties of food—and sure they didn't live like health freaks but were not UNhealthy) and two days before the first heart attack had been to the gym, ran for nearly an hour with a friend and swam 70 laps of a pool, with absolutely no problem. It looks like she also does not have high cholesterol. So they are puzzled about why a woman in her thirties with no risk factors suddenly has a heart attack, which is still to be determined (she has managed hypertension with a kidney problem, so whether that has damaged the vessels at some time past is a possibility). But in interaction with the other facets of this drama you can't help but see the hand of God.

What I spent last week doing was visiting the hospital, helping out with my sister's two kids (I took this photo on one of our many walks around the hospital) and then being back at my Mum's with my other sister and her two babies—this included a lot of borrowing cars, switching keys, driving about and co-ordinating changeovers, jiggling a baby or playing with a toddler, such things as trying to help out with Mandarin—as in the language—homework in a hospital room (at which I was no help at all!) and cooking meals for the whole lot of us for most nights. My younger sister is also staying with my Mum at the moment because they have recently been posted to Toowoomba with the Army and are in the process of buying a house there, so her husband is working in Toowoomba and coming back on weekends. Her children are 21 months and 4 months and they are both gorgeous but the 4-month-old is, well, difficult. At one point I was in the back seat of the car, caught in traffic in the rain on the way home from the hospital (which is 45 minutes from the house on a good run but an hour and a half that day), and finished up holding him, terrified that we were going to have an accident or that I was going to get arrested because I had been told to take him out of his car seat when no-one could take the screaming any longer.

I've also discovered just how hectic a primary school schedule is. Three mornings of the week my two nieces had things on that started at 7.00 am (two of them compulsory school things) and every afternoon of the week one of them at least had something on (slightly busier than usual because they are having some swimming lessons at the moment). On Friday afternoon I had just picked them up from swimming, then decided that I was going to take them to Cold Rock for ice-cream because they had never been there before and it was Friday afternoon—and I thought, well, maybe I will give then one last splurge before we all go on a no-cholesterol diet (even though that now doesn't seem to be the problem, and I am quite sure that mine has always been low but will get it checked). We had just got there when I got the call to say my sister was having the third heart attack, and Mum and my sister were on their way to the hospital (my brother-in-law was already there). I asked my Mum what I should do with the girls, but she wasn't the person to ask in that moment, so my younger sister told me to just take the kids home and act normal. So I just took a deep breath, pushed open the door of Cold Rock (the girls had already gone in and were gazing at the ice cream selection) and we talked ice cream, while I had a conversation with God at the same time. Then I took them to my Mum's place, where my younger brother-in-law, who was down for the weekend, was home alone with the two babies, one of whom was screaming. Somehow we managed to act cool, feed all these kids to the background screaming and bath two of them and then I took the girls up to the hospital for a visit after my sister came out of the second angioplasty (with prior warning that she might look a bit sick), the youngest niece told her Dad about her ice-cream, then my younger sister did a swap and took them home and went to deal with the baby (he's mostly formula fed now because he is lactose intolerant, which is some of his problem if my sister eats the merest hint of it) and I got to stay there for hours into the night with my Mum, who wasn't happy about my sister's blood pressure. My brother-in-law stayed that night at the hospital so the girls slept with us at Mum's and I had them for most of the weekend.

Kids are funny things. They seem so resilient and just want to go on with the small, normal things in life. But a good many of us know what childhood trauma actually does in the long term, what kids absorb when they seemingly aren't paying attention, and so I keep praying that they come out of all this OK. One afternoon the older one was taking a long time getting ready for gymnastics and I found her in her room gazing at her drawer in dismay because the clothes she usually wears weren't in there (we weren't really on top of the washing). So I pulled out a different leotard, which was pink and silver, and told her I was sure that she could wear that with the navy blue bike shorts and that they would look nice together. She looked at me for a second in uncertainty then left the room with them—I thought to put them on but I then heard her out in the backyard asking her sister if she could wear that, which I thought was rather cute (her Mum told me that one afternoon previously she'd cried at gym because she didn't like her outfit!). Something has changed about the world of my own youth if you can't wear pink and blue together. Then my younger niece didn't want to pack her pyjamas in case she needed to sleep Nanny's on Friday night (this was before I knew about the actual heart attack) because she was desperate to go to a birthday party that she had been invited to on the Saturday and thought sleeping at Nanny's would somehow jeaopardise that. So, I didn't push it at this point and we ended up without pyjamas and later, when they did have to sleep at my Mum's, I had to reassure her that I would make sure she got to this birthday party the next morning. And, my goodness, I dropped her off at an opulent house on the river, a group of nine and ten-year-old girls were all taken down to the Gold Coast to Hog's Breath Cafe for lunch and then to some fun place called "Infinity" and seven hours later I was to pick her up. I didn't really like sending her so far away for so long, but she was happy and distracted for the day. Going to collect her felt like a scene out of Desperate Housewives (well, I've never actually watched that show but I can imagine). The house was full of glamorous school Mums chatting, with me uncomfortably trying to hold my own while they finished off with the cake and did a dance routine for us, but I knew that behind the smiling faces and the glossy houses were tales of unhappiness. I also took the older niece with me to collect her and caught one of the Mums saying to her "you will have to look after Mummy now" and I just wanted to put my hands over her ears. Why must people say such unhelpful things to children? She's only just turned twelve and the one thing she needs to know right now is that she can still be the kid, that there are adults around who are in control and taking care of people and stuff and that it is not her responsibility.

Anyway, this is a long post but feels like just a snippet of the week. My sister went home from hospital today and we are thankful that she is still here, though slightly baffled, and praying all goes well from this point on.