Detours on the Road

I vowed when I started this blog that it would be all about writing – the journey, the universal experience and travails of writers.  I wanted to share my journey, connect my road with others, create and explore our crossroads. 

Since I started on this path I have been singularly focused, not allowing myself any deviation, no side path sojourns.  I figured it took me long enough to even get (back) on this path – there was certainly no time for anything else.  But I just abruptly discovered that such a narrow, exacting vision and course isn’t reality.  In any journey there are inevitable detours.  Intrusive, unwanted, unwelcome, but there nonetheless.   

Perhaps it is a reminder of the fullness of the journey, that we can’t just choose

one path and say; “This is it.  Because I say so, this is the only path I’ll ever tread and I will not stray.  I choose this road and nothing else.”  What’s left then when something unexpectedly knocks you cleanly on your ass, light years from that path? 

I had a heart attack last week.  Monday my chest and arm hurt, Tuesday I was in the emergency room, Wednesday I was having a stent placed in my collapsed artery and Thursday I was home with

a bagful of meds.  My right hand is in a support cast so I don’t bend my wrist and disturb the healing, just a little hole to indicate the trauma from where they snaked a catheter following my arterial path into my heart.  There’s a bruise from the back of my hand where they had to start drawing blood when my other veins could take no more, all the way up my forearm.

Up until the stent was in my heart, I denied anything at all was really wrong.  It was all a mistake.  Maybe, at worse, some meds would be needed to right

whatever minor little thing was ailing me.  They didn’t get that this couldn’t happen to me, that it was in fact, impossible.  I’m relatively young, I have no family history, no genetic markers laying in wait to pounce, I’ve never smoked, I am an avid hiker, I eat healthy foods, no red meat, barely any meat at all, favoring vegetables – many of which I grow myself – and quinoa for my protein.  I am even still within the acceptable weight range for my height.  There is no way I should have had a heart attack.  But I did.  Undeniable, as I look down at my bruised arms, see the reams of literature splayed out over my kitchen counter, the foreign pill bottles.  I’ve never even taken vitamins. 

As I field the calls from family and friends, the containers of food I can’t

stomach right now, tell my unbelievable tale over and over, it is starting to sink in – this is now a fact of my life.  Done deal, no coming back, no way to avoid, no shortcuts to scurry into.  There is no running away from this one.  The collision and detour has happened.  Now, where will it lead?  Will it turn me back along from whence I came?  Do I have to start all over again? Will it be some sort of new inspirational launching pad like a cheesy Hallmark after school movie?  Or will it

leave me stranded between the crossroads, unable to move ever again from this spot right here, right now, in pain and confusion?  I don’t know.  It scares me I don’t know.  I built my path methodically, stubbornly, single-mindedly.  Now I can only sit here on the side of this new road, not knowing which way to turn, what to do, how to reconcile the ‘why?’

I relive unrelenting flashes from the hospital:  The vampire nurse with the wild

exhausted eyes so close to mine in the middle of the night, jabbing the needle over and over again into my collapsed vein, moving it around seeking blood; the confused roommate recovering from hip surgery, screaming and moaning throughout the unending night; the next night’s roommate with the obnoxious extended family who took over the whole room, loud, invasive, blocking the bathroom even, hesitating to move when I needed to get in; the thick viscous goop I pulled off in handfuls, left all over my body from the monitor and EKG tabs; not

having even a toothbrush or a comb, no offer of a shower, sweating in my narrow bed, strapped to a hundred cords by needles in my veins that bled when I tried to move; the chaplain who came in to offer services to those interested, then sat with me while I choked down sudden unexpected sobs; the frightened eyes of my son when he saw me, the unbearable knowledge that I had in one moment ruined the innocence and excitement of his pending move across the country, and changed our relationship forever; the screaming catheterization lab nurse who was convinced that by virtue of my occluded artery, I had also gone deaf and lost about 100 IQ points in the process.

I awake aching, with “why?” on my lips.  I search for a reason, a catalyst, something, anything I have done – ever – that would explain, that I can fix; the doctors shrug and mark the “atypical” box.  There doesn’t seem to be any answer.

I am now forever defined by this event.  I must wear it for the rest of my life.  It is suddenly my new identity, who I am, and I must always fully disclose it, to random strangers on the street apparently.  I have to have a bottle of Nitroglycerin pills on my person at all times, as well as a medical card disclosing

I have a stent and the exact location it resides within my heart.  This miniscule stent is now struggling to integrate itself into my system, do its job, without being rejected.  It will take up to a year for my cells to encompass it, cover it completely, for my system to quit fighting it, accept its invasion and existence, allow that it’s helping, that it is saving my life every day.

I can only wonder how long it will take me to do the same.