I didn’t die yesterday. This is of course true every day we wake up – but we don’t often think about it. But yesterday I came much closer than usual – how close, I don’t actually know, but close enough for concern and a reminder of mortality and to be grateful for being alive.
Part of my post-covid syndrome is that my autonomic nervous system (which does the automatic cardiovascular things) doesn’t work properly. It still mostly works in that I am kept alive, but if I’m upright, it struggles to get enough oxygenated blood to my head. If my ANS has to do more – from physical exertion or mental exertion – it gets stuck in a stressed state and doesn’t relax naturally; sitting up too quickly to have a drink or moving around my room can leave me with a higher heartrate for a few hours, feeling stressed out the while.
Anyway, for the most part, day-to-day, it’s livable and not going to kill me. Mine is not a life-threatening or terminal condition – though if I do too much I can get worse and be stuck in an awake coma where I have even less energy than I have now, and end up not having enough energy to do anything, or to recover…
… but having had Covid-19 and post-covid syndrome is linked to a higher chance of strokes and heart attacks. Partly because of an increase in blood clots, and perhaps also because of damage to the ANS. I think this latter is what got me.
So I had eaten lunch and was lying on the sofa, as I usually do. Eating lunch is physical activity so I was giving myself a little break after before… moving to lie down somewhere else and watch some videos. My body is coming back to being relaxed nicely, heartrate trending down, feeling fine… when suddenly:
BOOM. Severe tachycardia (high heartrate).
I first felt like… I had swallowed an air bubble, or my heart had dropped or skipped a beat. And immediately my heart was pounding. I checked my monitor app as well as counting it manually to verify, and, yep, it was high (170ish).
(Thankfully, it settled down naturally after a few minutes, all was fine.)
This is around the maximum, usually comes with intense exercise. Not meant to suddenly happen while lying still. This sort of tachycardia doesn’t usually happen to me – maybe twice before, and when it happened last montht it only went up to about 130.
In the moment, I felt calm. I’ve always been calm in a crisis. I registered that ‘this might be serious’, but there was no fear or panic. Maybe that’s an acceptance of death, or maybe it was just focusing on what might need to be done.
Which was to alert my parents to observe me in case it became a cardiac arrest and a quick ambulance call and CPR would be needed. Thankfully it wasn’t. And in the afternoon, I wasn’t particularly thrown by it, but just had a greater awareness that life is fragile and precious. A reminder to be less frustrated by what I can’t do and go with the flow of what I can.
(Which is a good reminder that you should raise the alert before it’s too late… if you might be in an emergency situation, tell someone or press the button or whatever, before you need need it and it may be too late. Too often people don’t want to be a bother or cause a scene and don’t do this.)
And I’m no expert on heart attacks, but the heart suddenly and for no external cause going into severe tachycardia seems like the sort of thing that could be the step before a cardiac arrest, either because the electrical signals regulating heartrate have got totally messed up, or because at this irregular rhythm the heart isn’t effectively pumping blood anymore, or because there is some sort of blockage and the heart is fast to try and compensate. I don’t know really. But it feels like yesterday, I was much closer to maybe dying than usual.
So. Life is fragile and preciousI took that as a reminder to be grateful to be alive, even if things are difficult and bad. Live your fullest life every day.