Where do I begin

I was 26 years old, married, and a mother of two. I had what seemed like a great life. 

I had the white picket fence, so to speak.  My first husband was a truck driver and worked away weeks at a time. I was a stay at home mom and loved every minute of it. One Sunday night before my husband was headed to work, I was feeling chest pains so decided to take a trip to the emergency room before he left. I was assuming it probably was nothing. I had never been in the hospital other than to have my tonsils removed and to have my children. I was a non-smoker, had never done any drugs, drank sparingly and ate well. I was young and healthy.

It was a strange unknown atmosphere when I walked through the doors of the hospital. Blue walls, striped curtains, people everywhere, the strange smell. I can recognize that smell now. I saw a doctor and explained my situation, he ordered an ECG. The lady had come in with a machine and put sticky things on my body and attached wires to them, she told me to lie still and that would be over soon. The doctor returned and asked if I had any family history of heart problems, the only thing I knew was that my maternal grandfather had passed away in his 40’s of what was thought to be a heart attack.

This man in this long white coat proceeded to tell me that I had what they call first degree heart block. He said that a lot of people had it and it’s “no big deal”, but he wanted me to come back in the morning to see a heart specialist. I went home and told my husband that I had to return to the hospital in the morning but there was nothing to be concerned about. I reassured him to head to work.

I got up in the morning like any other morning, dropped my children off to a sitter and headed back to the hospital to clear up any questions that had arisen from the night before. When I got into the room, I was given an IV and hooked up to a heart monitor by a nurse. She said we were waiting for the doctor to come in to run a test by pushing on the side of my neck.  He came in and everything seemed to turn very formal. The nurse was standing at the end of my bed with a needle in her hand. I asked what that was for and she told me it was to start my heart again if it stopped during the test. At that moment, I sat up to be sick from my nerves. The doctor saw on the monitor that I actually had third degree heart block, which was very serious.

After some further testing at a different hospital that day, I received a pacemaker. I was now a 26-year-old mother of two with a heart problem and mechanical device that my heart relied on.

In the blink of an eye, our lives can change. As humans, we can comfort ourselves with this. When it actually happens, everything you thought you knew becomes different. For me, fear set in and controlled my mind, my sleep, my whole life. I no longer felt like the person I had been for 26 years. It all changed in one day.