Lana took us to see the Cardiologist.  For once I did not spend three hours waiting but was pretty much whisked in and out with the magic transplant sticker.  

Bottom line is my heart is ok, considering.  It is working too hard, all of the time.  My walking pulse rate is often over 130.  Resting awake it is rarely under 100.  Blood pressure and  blood oxygenation are nominal even under a light load.  

I did not have a heart attack.  Hearts stop after a while when they do not get oxygen.  That is what happened to mine.  Even though there was an oxygen mask on my face before I lost consciousness, delivering oxygen to my lungs, my lungs could not process out the CO2 that had accumulated.  Eventually, and for a very short period of time my heart just stopped because it had no fuel.  This was the initial event that brought me into the hospital.  The intubation and the drug regimen kept enough o2 flowing into my lungs and heart. 

What happened while I was in the hospital was something different all together from what brought me there, I think.  I will need to see The Dr. before I understand fully what happened and why it happened when it did.  What happened that night was tachycardia.
Cardiologist shrugs and says "well, your lungs they cause stress on your heart and sometimes you get this run away rhythm called tachycardia.  Seems I am lucky and strong and that this was my first bout with this new acquaintance.  Over the next year or two or more this is what is going to happen to me sometimes, and leave me weaker and weaker with less and less lung capacity (less than 15% now)  This is not a one time thing.  There is no fix, other than a transplant, which is still just a dream. This is what kills people with emphysema.  I think my mother survived three attacks.  I have promised my caregivers that this first one does not count.  We are still set at 0.  There will most definitely be a DNR on me after two.


When he told me my heart was ok, sufficiently strong in every aspect, so as to allow lungs to be transplanted into my chest I felt empty.  I asked him a few more questions, made more appointments in a few months and left the office.  Once we got downstairs I could tell I was going to bawl like a baby.  Transplant is hope, and pain and suffering on a scale rarely imagined.  I am to become a FrankenRussell, maybe.  It's the dream.  It's what I am begging for. I did not sleep much last night.  I had very negative thoughts.  I remembered how good I felt, how happy we were, how simple everything was just last February when we knew there was no hope. There was, is a simplicity to that.  One lives, one does what one can, one eventually decides the price is simply too high, and one exits.  It is all so, so simple.

We took another route.  I have to want that transplant.  I cried today, really hard from the heart because I know that the choice I am making is going to be far harder, far more painful, will involve many, many interventions.  I have little doubt there will be a hundred moments that I will wish I was dead, that I had made that other choice. That was why I cried today.  I felt a little sorry for myself.  Silly, stupid, lucky me.  I am not crazy about pain and I know I am signing on for a 10/10 motherload.  I tell the nurses to inject a little roughly, do the iv insertion harshly I tell them what I am trying to have done and ask them to help me get a little bit more used to pain. It's working too.  I am far less sensitive to mild and moderate pain than I was just a few months ago.  Don't even flinch.  Make it hurt, baby. 

I want that transplant because I love Nicole, I need to be with her for a few years more.  I want that transplant because it felt so heavenly to get drenched in the rain yesterday.  I want to write, and write and write.  I should have started this exercise a long time ago.