Living with (heart) failure

My aunt’s family physician for the last forty years said something that shocked me yesterday: “Well, your aunt’s in heart failure, but I’m fairly optimistic that with the right combination of medications, we should get this looked after.”

And that is where we’re at right now. Aunt Annie is in Beaumont, and, technically speaking, she is in heart failure. Her heart’s running at about 20% efficiency, and her pulse is somewhere around 110 beats per minute as the fluid around her heart and in her lungs continue to make it harder for her heart to pump blood around her body.

She’s going to have a catheterization on Monday, and again, the family physician is very optimistic about that, as are the cardiologists, who want to get in there and see what’s going on. They’re not sure whether she has a blockage somewhere, or what else might be going on, so she’s going to have what has become a relatively routine procedure, though surgery is surgery.

Throughout the last couple of days, I’ve heard her words from last Friday’s fall echoing in my brain: “Don’t come home, because all you’ll do is spend your time worrying in an empty house.” And, despite therapy, psychiatry and medication, I remain, quite honestly, a mess right now.

I desperately want to just get back to work, but having my 80-year-old Aunt in the hospital with heart failure has been so stressful and scary that I’ve come home to an empty house and just spent my time worrying. I’m struggling as I have the attention span of a hamster on speed, and I’m tired all the time from the stress.

Aunt Annie tells me to not worry about her so that she doesn’t worry about me, but that’s much easier said than done, especially given that I’m living with my own diseases in an anxiety disorder and depression.

I know that this is not an ideal situation, to go from blogging about the Wings at training camp to not producing a product, but I can only do what my body and brain will let me get away with, and until Monday, at least, I’m not going to be of much use.

In any case, I miss you all and I miss reading and writing and interacting with you on the blog and Twitter and FB, and you are a dear and kind audience to have, one that really sustains me, but I hope that you can forgive me for stepping away to tend to someone who is very ill.

In theory, anyway, once we get answers from the first of what might be a series of catheterization procedures, if AA gets on the right medications, and accommodates some lifestyle changes, we should be able to navigate a world in which the one pseudo-parent I have left out of the three that raised me will totally be able live with heart failure.

Gord knows, AA certainly still has enough spunk, fight and determination in her to keep riding the roller coaster of life for as long as she possibly can. She’s not ready to give up by any means, and neither am I…

Right now, however, everything is jumbled and scary, and as very desperately as I want to get back to being a hockey blogger, life isn’t affording me that privilege.

It’s frustrating, but that’s where both of us are at right now, and just as the noises and beeps and bed position changes and roommate and constant medical attention aren’t affording her much rest, being without my aunt is affording me a similar set of mental stimuli.

Today’s priority was to get the aunt her radio and some Xylitol lozenges for her dry mouth (basically the same stuff that’s in those Listerine strips). Where we’ll be by tomorrow or Monday, I’m not certain, but I’m hoping that 48 hours from now, we’ll have some answers. Then we can work on restoring a measure of peace, for both of us.