Friday, May 21, 2004

The Suspense Continues

Mornin. Just a short journal entry today. We were up a few times during the night, but kept returning to bed. Just tired. And, we had forgotten to take the medicine again. We took it the first time we were up.

I don’t know what to do with our memory. We forgot Dr. M.’s appointment. I know really dumb stuff. I know that at 3 pm, we looked at our clock and thought ... we’ve finally got some time to work on our critical CARF project. We figured we’d have 3 to 3 ½ hours. We should have thought at that time, Dr. M’s today ... we have about 45 minutes. But, that didn’t happen.

I don’t know what it is that makes us forget. We’ve had so many problems with it that it seems hardly unfair to use it as an excuse. We should have written it into the schedule, or maybe set our timer or something, but I guess we’re not this smart. We think I guess in our mind, of course we’re going to remember ... it was a very important session. But, that didn’t happen.

We had been caught up in the project and although we checked the email at 3:00 pm, didn’t go back to it until 6 pm. when we were tired and frustrated with the progress of our work. That’s when we saw Dr. M’s email. We felt terrible. We put a call in, then thought to email, and then we went home. By then Dr. M. had emailed back. He said, we could talk this morning, because he had some extra time. I won’t hope for as much as it would be a full hour, but we’ll take what we can get.

Part of our problem was that we’d been off work a day and a half. So, we hadn’t been able to in our mind capture and hold onto what day it was. I’m thinking though that Dr. M. will say something like somewhere in our mind, we really didn’t want to be there. We thought of that on the way home and wondered if somehow we really didn’t want to be at that meeting. I would hope our mind wasn’t thinking in this direction. I know consciously we hadn’t had thoughts of missing an important meeting, but I’m not sure how the mind works in this regard.

I do know that after we’d started to think about it, we had to ask ourselves, "How much does anyone really want to know IF their heart is diseased?" Seems we’ve put in quite a bit of time in trying to understand what might have happened for the report to be reading possible infarct. We’re almost consciously able now to associate the word, "infarct," with heart attack.

We’re still working at it. After we got home there was another email in our box from the heart place. So, we followed it and found some short video diagrams of all kinds of things to do with the heart. It seems we understand better. We can understand everything they are saying, but we aren’t able to remember the names of the things we are watching. We know that Dr. M. had last time talked about heart stuff that we weren’t able to hold in our mind. We know for example, he said something about heart surgery, but we weren’t able to recall why he’d mentioned it.

We’re guessing it was an alternative of what may be found, but we’re thinking usually he doesn’t tell us stuff much in advance, or to scare us or anything. We read last night that about 25% of heart attacks are silent, in that people don’t recognize them as such. And, women in general don’t have always the classic signs of deep chest pains, etc. They said though that women have more actual heart attacks then men, but I don’t remember the number ... it wasn’t by much though like if 2 million men had heart attacks, the female number would be like 2.3 million.

Another thing I sorta remember them saying that was that more women die by heart attack each year than breast cancer, accidents, and diabetes combined. That was kind of a threatening number. It seems that if your black, the numbers are higher. I’ve got most of the higher risk factors with the exception of high blood pressure. A slight relief.

In general, we’re in preparation for the worse case scenario ... let’s now hope for the best?

Shoot, gotta go ... it’ll be ok, right?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Forgot Meds?  Forgot Dr. M.?   I can imagine how scared all of you are `bout the waiting for results. [[Prayers]]........[[Hugs]]
V

Anonymous said...

Tired???? I can understand.  When we feel overwhelmed, sleep is our best friend.  I sense that you are worried.  Maybe more than should be.  Feeling overwhelmed?  I fell in my heart that all will be well.  You know, people love you very much and we want you all to be able to be healthy.  Heatlh is a state of mind, you know?  Please don't stress - -  I know you all will be fine.  Know that you all are loved....
Tammy