Wednesday, April 10, 2024
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I didn’t find myself in a tunnel; see a mystical light;
encounter a deceased loved one; or watch my entire life pass before me when I
died on March 15 for 40 seconds. What I remember is coming up out of black.
That is the only way to explain things. I saw blackness recede as a medic
slapped my face and my husband, seated directly across the room from me cried, “Varda,
Varda! Varda, wake up!”
As they prepared to carry me out on a stretcher to a waiting
ambulance, I wailed, in a continuation of the moments before my “pause,” “I don’t
want to go to the hospital. No. No. I don’t want to go in the ambulance!”
“Varda, your heart stopped for two seconds. You have to go,” said the ambulance
medic. I think he knew it was more than two, but wanted to keep me calm.
Two seconds? I thought. That’s not so long. It
didn’t sound serious—not like a real heart problem. More probably, I
thought, it was just simple dehydration, as one of my sons suggested
when I first felt unwell. Or perhaps, as my husband had insisted before I died,
that I was just overwhelmed.
My husband Dov, you see, had just undergone major surgery on
his spine. At present he required a great deal of care—my son therefore thought
I wasn’t taking care of myself, wasn’t drinking enough fluids, while Dov figured
it was all too much for me and I was having a nervous breakdown.
That is until I died right in front of him, right before his
eyes.
In fact, I was lucky that there were any medics around me at all at the
time I died. Otherwise, there would have been no compressions administered and
no Varda, too. Every one of my family members was sure I was waking them up at
5am for spurious reasons. So they didn’t call for help.
Now I understand them, being that I have a knack for drama,
and perhaps a mild tendency to hypochondria. As a child, for example, I
perfected the art of faking symptoms to get out of school, which I hated. I
knew just how long was long enough to run a thermometer under the hot water tap
to yield a believable temperature—believable enough that my mother would sigh
and let me stay home. (She suspected I was scamming her, but could not argue
against the empirical evidence of risen mercury in a milky glass tube).
All of which is why the first son I approached on that
strange, dark morning, got annoyed when I asked him to call Hatzalah. He
groaned and “tzatzkied” and put his head under the pillow to make me go away.
I went to him because in that otherworldly dawn, I felt as
though the blood had drained from my hands and face. That is the only way I can
describe the sensation. But no one I spoke to seemed to understood that description.
None of the medics had any inkling what I meant, nor any of the doctors in the
hospital. That is to say barring one, the affable South African cardiologist
who visited me in the intensive care cardiac unit (ICCU) the day after my
cardiac arrest.
When I told him it felt as though the blood had drained from
my hands and face, he said, “That’s because it had.”
The doctor asked me how long the feeling had lasted. “Hours,”
I said. “Even after I arrived at the hospital.”
“Interesting,” he said, his eyes alight.
On that chaotic morning, the strange sensation in my hands
and face told me I needed help. At the same time, I didn’t want to leave my post-surgery
patient, my husband, alone. So I decided to wake “very dependable son”—the one who
schleps his aging parents around to doctors and hospitals—to tell him to stay
with Dov. Once I had Dov covered, I could call for help.
But man plans and God laughs. By the time I managed to
stumble up the three steps leading to the upper level of our small apartment
where our boys’ bedrooms are located, I felt truly ill. I changed tack. I was
in trouble. I had to get help. Now.
“Call Hatzalah,” I said, stumbling into “very dependable”
son’s room.
I knew exactly what he was thinking when he groaned and pulled
the pillow over his head. “There’s Eema, being overdramatic again.”
I understood him, honestly. So I figured I’d call them
myself, but then I got sick in his doorway. “Be careful where you walk,” I
called to him as I stumbled out of his bedroom. “I puked in your doorway.”
“UGH,” he cried out, springing up from bed to see. “What
should I do?” he said.
“There are Clorox wipes in the kitchen,” I said.
He goes, gets three wipes, throws them at me, goes into his
bedroom, and firmly closes the door.
I’m faint, half-lying on the floor, which feels cool and soothing. I feel a bit
better, and try to clean up the small mess. But then I begin to feel increasingly ill.
Meantime, all the commotion has woken the son down the hall. He comes out of
his room. Yells, “What’s going on??”
“Call Hatzalah,” I say in distress.
“Eema. You’re just dehydrated. Take a drink.”
“I’m not dehydrated,” I tell him. “Something’s wrong.”
“What’s wrong?”
I try to explain the feeling in my hands and face. He says, “Pins and needles.
Right. Like I got when I was dehydrated in the army.”
Well, it isn’t like pins and needles, I thought, but
going over in my mind my son’s dehydration symptoms during his army stint, I was
almost convinced he was right.
Almost, but not quite. “Call Hatzalah. Please!”
But he kept on with the stuff about me needing to drink.
Went and got me a drink, in fact. I drank. And then I called Hatzalah.
Before I continue the saga it must be said there was a third
son. He’d been up very late that night and didn’t so much as bother to stick
his head out of the bedroom door to see what all the fuss was about.
The whole thing was real life tragicomedy. I was the The
Boy Who Cried Wolf. I recognized it for what it was and called Hatzalah,
myself. This, also is a story.
You see, three days earlier, having concerns about my
husband’s surgical wound, I schlepped with him to the ER, with very dependable
son as our driver. I had a lot of trouble managing Dov in the wheelchair, and a
nice Hatzalah volunteer, seeing my difficulties, helped me as much as she could
Once Dov was released from the hospital, we thanked this
kind caring Hatzalah volunteer profusely as she escorted us from the hospital, “For
what?” she asked in all modesty, seating us safely in the shade to wait for
very dependable son to bring the car around.
As she left us, this lovely angel of a volunteer told me
that in future, if I have any question about a surgical wound, or need a
surgical dressing changed, or any minor injury, to just call Hatzalah. In an
emergency, she told me, I should always call Hatzalah, because unlike
Magen David Adom, Hatzalah’s services are free. Furthermore, Hatzalah
operates everywhere, all over the country, including in my area. “Just call Hatzalah.
1221. That’s the number,” she said nodding, as if to confirm the information. “You
can call from anywhere in the country. 1221.”
Much of what this angel in the form of woman said to me about
Hatzalah’s services turned out to be incorrect. They won’t come, for example,
to change a surgical dressing. Because, I was later informed by a different
volunteer, that can only be done by a nurse or a doctor. In the end, however,
none of the misinformation mattered. What mattered was that the number 1221 stuck
in my head, so that when said head became fuzzy and unclear, and no one would
call for help, I was able to remember that number and call for help, myself.
This, in and of itself, was a miraculous feat, as I have
dyscalculia—like dyslexia, only with numbers instead of letters and words. Numbers
don’t stick in my mind or make much sense to me. But 1221 somehow made it into
my memory bank and stayed there long enough to save me.
So I called 1221, and the Hatzalah guy starts asking me questions.
In Hebrew. At first I’m fine, but then it begins to be too much for me in my addled,
native English-speaker state of mind, so at about the time he asks me to
describe what I am feeling, I just can’t speak anymore. I am faint, and half-standing,
half-lying on the tiled floor in the narrow hallway that leads to my sons’ bedrooms,
clutching my bathrobe and snood in one hand and my phone in the other. These items
I had had the presence of mind to grab from my bedroom as I began to feel
unwell.
It was like this: I got up while it was still dark, to use
the bathroom. Like most women my age, this is not an uncommon occurrence. I got
back into bed. I looked at my alarm clock. It was 4:45. I sighed. By the time I
fell back asleep, it would already be time to get up, so it was futile to try.
Instead I let my mind wander, just thinking about stuff. Nothing big or important.
I felt fine. But then I had a bit of pain under my left
ribcage. “Well, it’s not a heart attack,” I assured myself. “Women don’t get
chest pain when they’re having a heart attack.”
This too, turned out to not be quite the truth. The many
nurses and doctors who subsequently treated me in the intensive care cardiac
unit (ICCU), got a kick out of me when I repeated the bit about women and heart
attack symptoms. “That’s right,” they’d say, smiling and nodding, “most
of the time.”
At any rate, the pain was not that bad. A minor annoyance.
Then it began to hurt a bit more, a burning pain. Still lying in bed, I tried
shifting position.
That didn’t help, and I was anyway thirsty, and as I wasn’t going to be going
back to sleep, I got up very quietly to go get a drink. I didn’t want to wake
my sleeping post-surgery husband. It occurred to me to bring my phone with me
so I could play Dr. Google and self-diagnose my pain.
On the way to the fridge, I boot up my phone, and look for “pain under left rib.”
This comes up: “Pain under the left rib cage is commonly a sign of
pancreatitis, kidney stones, or inflammation in the stomach.”
Tummy Ache, I think. No biggie.
I shrug, and pour myself a glass of soda water, thanks to my
trusty, blue-and-white Soda Stream™ machine. Ahh. I think with delight
as I take a deep draught of cool soda. I leave the kitchen, turn into the
living room and my head begins to swim.
Next I feel nauseated. I run back into the kitchen, knowing I
won’t make it any farther than the kitchen sink, but I manage to hold it back.
My head is still spinning. I make my way back into the living room, and that is
when I begin to realize that something is really not right.
To be continued.
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