My Heart Clicks For You - Part 3

Catch up first if you haven't already by reading Part 1 & Part 2.

Hours later and I'm still in the ER. My blood pressure continued to register critically low as the monitors persisted in their relentless alarm alerts. And my heart was still racing as if I was running a marathon.

As the minutes slowly ticked away, I went in and out of consciousness, taking short naps as I continued to wait.  Minutes turned into hours and finally almost 6 hours later, the nurse starts prepping me for my move upstairs.  She unhooks me from the wall monitors and then reconnects me to a portable monitor that gets placed at the foot of my bed.

"It's protocol for heart patients" she says.  

I guess she saw the quizzical look on my face when I was staring at the "box" monitor that I learned later had to go with me everywhere I went.

Heart Patient.  

Those two little words now defined me inside the walls of this hospital.  And I couldn't help but wonder if those two little words will continue to define me outside of here...outside there...where my life awaited me.

My Heart Clicks For You

A foot long scar is forever a part of me now :-).  A reminder of God's miraculous work in my life. 

This morning I wake up to my husband with his head on my chest, a happy sight that always makes my heart flutter.  And as a smile slowly makes it away across my face, he looks up to me and says,

"I can hear your heart babe."  

To this I reply,

"It clicks for you.  And for our kids." 

Today's blog is a difficult one for me.  It will be the first time I openly talk about the details of that horrid day that led to my "ticker" being transformed to a "clicker".  You will know more about what I mean as you read on.  This blog is titled, "My Heart Clicks for You", in dedication to my Superman husband who assumed all of my roles at home in addition to his own, when I was temporarily out of commission :-).   And by temporarily I mean 3 months.  Yes all men of the world...my husband took care of business and did an incredibly fine job of it!

My Heart Clicks For You.
I always get a kick out of nurses and doctors when they listen to my heart.  The very shocked looks on their faces as they jerk away their stethoscope from my chest, trying hard to keep their professional composure so as not to let me in on their brief moment of unnerved "surprise"...

"Oh wait, let me listen to that again!"..

"Umm...hang on let me check your medical record." 

"Wait...is that a..er..ahem..a pacemaker...yeah that's a pacemaker right?"

LOL.

Every chance I get, I purposefully leave out the little tidbit about having an artificial heart valve.  It's one of the tiny and very few perks of having gone through double bypass open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve with a mechanical one, thus the "clicking" sound created every time blood whooshes through my aorta to get pumped to the rest of my body.  Did I mention that I was only 33 years old, healthy as a horse all of my life, birthed 4 children into this world, and did not have a single mar or even the tiniest of blips on my medical record that indicated otherwise?