2001 | A-Fib Cardiac Scare: An Unruly Heart Conducts an ICU Orchestra to Jingle Bells

The closer we got to the end of the series of treatments, the worse the chemicals affected my health.

I sent my mom and her carer home after the first chemotherapy session. She was already in her early eighties when we lost my eldest brother to colon cancer the previous year. My diagnosis and treatment came at a difficult time for her. She wanted so much to care for me by feeding me the foods and supplements she thought I needed to get well. Unfortunately, my children and their grandmother did not get on well, and I hated all this faffing and squabbling around me when I was feeling so unwell.

At the time, we lived in a spacious two-bedroom apartment, but in the end, I had to explain to my mother that too many people looking out for my well-being just made me feel sicker. I needed my space. I needed quiet.

Thus, when things started to go wrong the day on which I received the last chemo treatment, shortly before Christmas, I had to lean hard on my two young children. The oncologist left town for his annual holiday that very day. I was feeling ill and nauseated again, but by this time, I was accustomed to this reaction and knew it would pass, eventually. Olly and I went to bed early.

However, at nine o’clock that evening, I woke up, my pyjamas and bed linens drenched in sweat, and stumbled to the toilet to throw up every drop of liquid in my already parched body. I felt off-balance, and I could hear my heart hammering in my ears.

I called Karen, and my tone of voice must have alerted her to the fact that something was seriously wrong. Without saying a word, I just held out my arm for her to take my pulse. This was also a health condition of long standing – without warning and seemingly without good reason, my pulse rate would rapidly increase until it seemed that my heart was beating like the hooves of a runaway horse. My family practitioner has been treating me with a low-dose beta-blocker for years.

This time, my pulse was not only fast; it literally bounced erratically, missing a few beats before galloping off again. Karen’s first reaction was to call the oncologist, but he had already left town. The only other option was to get me to the clinic’s trauma unit as quickly as possible, luckily just a five-minute drive from our apartment.

When we arrived, the doctor on duty ordered the trauma staff to start monitoring my heartbeat while the ward sister paged the cardiologist on duty. As Murphy’s Law would have it, the cardiologist was busy with another emergency, and we had to wait for him.

Karen and Corné were banned from my cubicle and had to wait outside in the hallway. I could hear them talking to the staff, who were very busy and could not, or would not, answer their questions. They became more tense by the minute, belligerent, I should say. I knew they could hear the piercing bleep-bleep of the heart monitor, and they knew only too well that the penetrating sound of the machine's alarm, emitted with irritating regularity, was a signature of a heart beating too fast or too irregular.

Inside the cubicle, I was getting distraught myself. I could hear my children’s hysterical shrieks every time the alarm went off, and I knew I should reassure them that this too would pass. First things first, though; it felt like my bladder was about to burst, but nobody came to my rescue. So, I started removing the electrodes tethering me to the various machines, and the heart monitor emitted a long, shrill sound. Commotion ensued. Both the doctor and ward sister came running while the junior staff blocked my children from entering the cubicle.

I never saw the cardiologist that night. I was quickly admitted after all that commotion and pushed down a long corridor in a wheelchair, with the bleeping monitor and my two children in attendance. Apparently, the cardiologist prescribed medication and treatment telephonically, and my children were reassured that I was not in immediate danger but would be kept overnight for observation. I can imagine that they spent a rather sleepless night, but so did I.

In the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), I was pumped full of chemicals and told to sleep, with all the machines and wires still attached. The machines beeped and honked in time with my heart, now slowly, then hopelessly too fast, then not at all. With all the noise and the lights shining brightly in the ward, I couldn’t sleep. So, I just lay there, listening to the beeping noises and watching the monitors to see whether I was still alive. I was softly singing Jingle Bells to myself to the beat of the beeping and honking machines. Because it was so close to Christmas, and I was trying to keep calm.

In the bed next to me, another elderly lady’s heart machines made just as much noise. She couldn't sleep either, so she sang along with me while brushing her hair with one of those battery-driven hairbrushes that vibrates and massages one’s scalp. You know? Anyhow, from a corner bed, an old, shaky voice suddenly said: “Please switch off that radio and for God's sake, tell that woman not to use her dildo in here!”

Of course, my fellow sufferer and I burst out laughing, waking all the patients in the ward. The scowling ward sister handed out another round of sleeping pills. Sometime during the night, my heart calmed down, and I also fell asleep. At six o’clock sharp the next morning, a bevy of cardiologists arrived for their morning ward rounds, and I woke up to find an unknown man with the most beautiful curly grey hair and clear blue eyes holding my hand, or maybe he was checking my pulse, come to think of it. My monitor went haywire there for a moment. He said I experienced an episode of atrial fibrillation (A-Fib) and needed to spend another day in the clinic for observation.

Then, from the corner bed came that same old shaky voice again: “Not only do you get to have fun in the middle of the night, but you get the only looker among that lot as well!”

Featured image: AI illustration of a woman lying awake in an ICU bed surrounded by heart monitors, imagining the steady beeping of machines as music to stay calm through the night.