Tuesday, September 10, 2013

When Bad News is Actually Good (originally written in April)


So it has been quite some time since I have written.  Just when I was getting into the swing of writing, I allowed life to get in the way.  I wrote a draft for a post on April 20, but never took the time to finish it and put it up on the web, so here is what I wrote back in April.  In February my family took in a house quest that threw off my mojo for quite some time.  Not that that should be any kind of excuse to not work on my goal, but it was what it was.  Then at the end of March I started having some medical issues that consumed my mental time. Then last week (April) we got the news that I have a congenital heart defect.  Bad news, right?  Yeah, not the greatest, but it has actually been rather relieving for me.

My defect is called Patent Ductus Arteriosis (PDA).  Go look it up…ok if you insist I will explain it:  when we were all in utero we get our oxygen from our mothers, this is possible because of a duct that connects the pulmonary artery (the one that takes unoxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs for oxygenation) to the aorta (the heart valve that takes the oxygenated blood to our cells in the body).  When we are born this duct (ductus arteriosis) conveniently closes so our heart does the oxygenation on our own.  Well my duct didn’t close like it was supposed to.  What this means is that when my heart pumps some of the oxygenated blood going through my aorta passes back through my PDA into the pulmonary artery and into my heart as well, thus mixing oxygenated blood with the unoxygenated blood.  To my mind this means my body doesn’t get all the oxygen it should and adds unnecessary blood volume to the left side of my heart, pulmonary artery and lungs.  This can cause shortness of breath, tachycardia (fast heart rate), heart murmurs, bounding pulse, etc., etc. If untreated it can lead to congestive heart failure (which usually wouldn’t happen until I was in my 50’s or 60’s).

Oh no! Scary Kae! … My cardiologist didn’t feel like it was anything to be overly concerned about right now.  He says we will do a procedure to “fix it” after I have healed up from having baby.  He told me the echocardiogram showed a very normal healthy heart other than the PDA.  The only bad is that I need to listen to my body more during the pregnancy and rest more than I would and not push myself too hard.  But is that bad?  I like to feel like I can do everything by myself and only ask for help if I can’t push hard enough.  Lately I have noticed that I have way less energy, so I have backed off and not pushed like normal.  I have felt guilty to a fault sometimes and I guess what this does is allow myself to rest.  My family has stepped up spectacularly to help fill in the gaps.

So how can this news be a relief?  I mean I will have to get it fixed right?  Yes, but my relief comes from looking back at my life and speculating that some of my issues in life can possibly be explained by this condition.  I have moaned in this blog before how I have struggled with exercise and being physically fit and felt fat for most of my life.  I remember in elementary how frustrated I was every year when we had to participate in the presidential fitness test to receive that “award.”  I loved to run, but I was so slow that I hated the 50-yard dash.  Sit ups were a joke because I would run out of breath if I tried to do them too fast, etc., etc.  My scores were always VERY low and I was embarrassed every year.  I loved to play soccer, but I always ended up playing goalie cause I couldn’t get to the ball fast enough.  Hiking was another activity that I adore, but I felt bad for those forced to hike with me cause I was one of the slowest.  There were so many times that I felt like my legs were capable of so much more, but I just couldn’t tackle it with all the struggles to breathe.

When I was a teenager I remember feeling like I couldn’t “keep up” with my friends.  Not really being able to quite put my finger on the exact problem we called it exhaustion.  I went through tests for mono and thyroid problems, nope, no mono and a perfectly healthy thyroid.  Then one doctor tried to tell me I had exercise-induced asthma.  This never made sense to me.  I had siblings with asthma; I knew what it looked like.  I never believed I had asthma. (PDA causes shortness of breath.  Imagine that!)  This same doctor also tried to tell me I had depression and needed to take Prozac.  When he said that my mom grabbed me, we got up and walked out of the office.  This bad experience effectively ended the search to discover why I was “exhausted.”  I have just dealt with it like I always had, but it was always a frustrating feeling, like I couldn’t perform like everyone else could.  I never really told anyone that though.

Then about 6-7 years ago I started noticing weird heartbeats.  I had moments, random moments not tied to any particular activity I was doing, when I could FEEL my heart beating super strong and irregular.  Sometimes they would last so long that it kind of started to hurt a little.  After I had two or three of these “episodes” that lasted longer than a half hour Brad took me to the ER while one was happening.  Of course when I was hooked up to the EKG (for like 10 seconds) I wasn’t actually having a palpitation so the ER doctors treated me like I was faking it all.  By the time we were able to convince the doctors to monitor me the episode was ending.  They did catch some irregular heartbeats, but not as much or as strong as they would have had they hooked me up right away.  They said the irregular beats were on the “abnormal side of normal,” nothing to be concerned about.  I mean what is that supposed to mean anyway?  I figure the words abnormal and heart together isn’t really a good thing, but they blew me off and I had no desire to go see a cardiologist and have them blow me off as well.  Over the next few years I learned to deal with the episodes and sometimes I could go months between irregular palpitations.  I pushed it aside like the exhaustion issue and let it stay at the back of my mind.  It wasn’t until this pregnancy and having palpitations a whole lot more than normal that I decided to go see a cardiologist about it.

Now I speculate that all these things in life are being explained by this condition, I haven’t had the doctor tell me that this is the case.  I am just speculating.  But this speculation has been such a relief to me.  It has allowed me to accept the fact that I have not been able to push myself as hard as I have wanted to in the past and it has also allowed me to accept the much weaker me that I have been with this pregnancy.  Another thing that this discovery has allowed me to do is accept help from others where before I would have been super stubborn to ask for help. 

I am hopeful that after I get my heart “fixed” this fall I will be able to have more stamina and push myself to that point in exercise where I feel like my body is truly at it’s limits.  I really have never felt that way, I always felt like because I was “so fat” and “out of shape” that was why I couldn’t go as fast or far as I felt my body should be able to go.  I guess I hope that the reality is that my body wasn’t getting the needed oxygen to go past that point so that is why I was always so slow.  So if my heart stops pumping oxygenated blood into areas that can’t use it and my body gets it all I should be able to function like a normal person right?  I know that because of my “down time” during this pregnancy and the obvious need for recovery after having the baby I will truly be out of shape so it will take some time to get up to a good standard, but at least I will know why I am where I am, instead of feeling like I am inadequate because I am fat or lazy.  Like I said at the beginning, bad news, but it has and will do me so good.