Part 1 of 3.
Friday was the perfect day to schedule my knee surgery prior to Memorial Day weekend. Three days of rest and I would be able to return to my desk job on Tuesday morning. Short on funds, I held off paying the company medical insurance and workman’s compensation until then.
The surgery was a simple procedure for a torn meniscus and I rested at home pain free. Saturday was like any another day, but I opted to stay home from church on Sunday morning because of sloped floors. Interestingly, the sermon was on miracles and at the end of the service my husband and son went forward to pray for me, which is extremely uncommon. Little did we know how much we would need those prayers for a miracle.
At 4am Monday morning, the dogs woke me up to go outside. The usual pattern is I walk to the slider door in the living room instead of our bedroom so I don’t wake Don. But this Memorial Day 2017 was to prove anything but usual.
I reached over and shook Don and asked if he would let our two Labrador dogs out. As he stood at the back door and called to them, they remained by my side looking at him like he had lost his mind. Since one was a pup, you had to actually walk out the door with her or she wouldn’t go. He walked out with them, they did their business and came in.
Fifteen minutes later, clueless to what had just taken place prior; I sat up in bed and turned on my nightstand lamp. Don rolled over and asked what was wrong. Rubbing the top of my chest, I told him I thought I needed a pain pill which was Tylenol with Codeine. He went and got a pill and glass of water for me. Handing them to me as I sat on the edge of the bed, the dogs were antsy. I asked him to please take the dogs out. Don let out a frustrated groan and with clenched teeth mumbled…”I hate these dogs!”
Within seconds, I got up to use the bathroom 8 feet away, which is a water closet (toilet only). As I sat down I instantly felt unusually strange. My last coherent thought was to grab the towel bar. At the same exact time the dogs went 20 feet out the back door and immediately came back and barged in the small area where I was. Don followed them because he heard me making a peculiar sound.
As he rounded the door, he found me still sitting on the toilet with my arms up over my head, my legs out as my body tried to straighten itself. I had vomited, was foaming at the mouth and my eyes had rolled back in my head. He was seeing me die.
Grabbing his phone he called 911 and told them I was unconscious and having a hard time breathing. He continued to scream my name over and over. Having a sense of humor has always been important to me. I truly believed in the midst of this trauma, God left us with a chuckle. As Don was screaming my name, suddenly I came to and asked him abruptly, “Why are you screaming at me?” I reached down and pulled up my pants (to which I will be eternally grateful the paramedics didn’t find me in that condition) and he help me stagger back to bed where I collapsed again.
Waiting for the paramedics, Don refused to let me lay down. He propped pillows behind me or had our teenage granddaughter Janae who had also woken up to sit behind me. Minutes later the Fire Dept. arrived. Jeff, the Captain had already let his crew know that this was his call, it was a family he knew and loved and he was taking control. As he walked in our bedroom Don was positioned between me and Jeff. When he asked Don what was up, Don moved and when Jeff saw me he was instantly on high alert to the magnitude of this call. He knew I was in serious trouble.
He began to ask Don some questions and recognized he was in a state of shock. Jeff put his hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eye and said, “Don, this is what you are going to do. Go get dressed, put on your shoes and wait for me in your truck; yet just know you can’t follow the ambulance because I will be running red lights.” He then turned to my daughter Brooke who had beat the ambulance to our house and answered Jeff’s questions.
But the one question Jeff asked that nobody could answer was if I had ever had a blood clot.
As Don got dressed, I was placed on a gurney and taken out to the waiting ambulance. Flat-lining in our driveway, I was quickly put in the ambulance to begin CPR. Rushing me back to the hospital where I had my knee surgery, they inserted a breathing tube and began breathing for me.
Arriving at the hospital, I was whisked into a trauma room where I flat-lined again. My heart had stopped beating for a second time and I was fighting for my life…….