07.43
I wake up, the sun shines, and the birds sing. It will be another beautiful and warm day. I love the Danish summer, especially when the sun is shining. I reach for my smartphone; it's 7.43 am, and it's time to get up. My wife and children are still sleeping.
I get up and go downstairs to our large window, which faces Hejlsminde Nor and Lillebælt a little further out. It's a sight I never get tired of; hilly terrain and the sea, a beautiful combination.
Suddenly I notice that something is pressing behind my sternum. It's a feeling I've never experienced before. Wondering what it is? It feels like something is stuck. I don't remember eating anything during the night that could be to blame for that mysterious pressure. I go to the fridge, find some cocoa milk and drink it, hoping the tight feeling in my chest will disappear. It does not help. Meanwhile, Nanna and the children have woken up and come downstairs:
How do you look' says Nanna. Are you OK?
Good question, I think and say:
I don't know. I have such a strange pressure behind my sternum.
She asks:
What you think it is?
I have no idea.
I wonder like crazy about what to do and suddenly exclaim:
I go out and hang myself in the garage …
Nanna looks at me strangely, and I hasten to add:
uhh, you know, in the arms.
Maybe it's something muscular, i.e., a pinched tendon. I jump up and grab the edge of the garage roof, stretching my entire body as best I can. I have no idea how long I hang and dangle in the garage, but suddenly Nanna stands at the door and says:
how long do you intend to hang there?
I jump down, and she asks if it helped:
No, unfortunately not
I reply. Well, now what? I have no idea:
Let's try the Tai; maybe it will help
Nanna shakes her head. I lie on the cold wooden floor and ask Nanna to walk sideways across my back. I am lying on the floor with chest pains and asking my wife to rub my back. The sound of my back crunching and the cold floor makes me forget my chest pains. That doesn't help either. I start to run out of ideas and sit on the couch and think. Nanna and the children eat breakfast. I ask Nanna to prepare my eldest son Erik for kindergarten and take Karl with me. He's only 90 days old that day, and I can't quite fathom looking after him. While Nanna is on her way out the door, I call out to her:
I'll get into bed and find out what this is.
I think I'm trying to calm her down a bit.
It's nice to be back in bed, I have no idea what to do, but I'm thinking, maybe Google is my friend? I googled chest pain and came across some sites. I skim the first section and come down to a list that says the following:
Do you experience:
Radiation in the left arm or both arms?
Does the pain go up into the jaw?
Are you dizzy?
Do you have cold sweats?
Do you have chest pain?
I could answer yes to all five of the above.
The conclusion was that I was most likely affected by a blood clot in the heart. Here you would think I panicked, but that didn't happen. I got curious and read on. I found a line that jumped out at me because it said: 1 in 4 men with a blood clot in the heart die before they get to the hospital. Again, you'd think I panicked, but I didn't. Instead, I got up, grabbed some clothes, and went back downstairs. Out in the toilet, I fixed my hair, brushed my teeth, and went into the living room to wait for Nanna and Karl. I wondered how to explain what I had read to her. Four months before, on April 9, Nanna's father suffered a brain hemorrhage, and that incident was still deeply etched in her mind. I hasten to add that he survived without but.
I hear her car in the driveway and think, what should I say to her? The door opened, and before I could say anything, she shouted:
What did you find out? ... uhh, I think I've got a blood clot in my heart.
She seemed surprisingly calm, and I asked her to call our doctor Anders. Fortunately, she came through immediately and told him about my symptoms. She asks if we should stop by. Anders raises his voice and says:
No, you don't have to; I'll call an ambulance immediately; that's the procedure.
It dawned on me that this was serious. Very serious. What do you do while waiting for an ambulance with a possible blood clot in the heart? One thing NOT to do, which often comes up as good advice on Facebook, is to cough. It can have fatal consequences.
I lie down on the couch and do breathing exercises. It doesn't take long, just 12 minutes before the ambulance shows up.
An ambulance attendant and an ambulance assistant enter the house. They start by taking an EKG (electrocardiogram) on me to get a snapshot of my situation. I lie on my back with electrodes on my chest, arms and legs. After a short time, they can read on their equipment that something is wrong. I hear them faintly discussing where to drive me. First, they talk about me going to Vejle, then Kolding, and then Odense. Suddenly the paramedic says to the paramedic; we need to get hold of a helicopter immediately. I think, shit, this is wrong, but right after it hit me, a helicopter, it's cool, I've never flown in one like that before, and it can easily land here with us because here there is nothing but fields. The helicopter ride didn't come to fruition as it was en route to rescue another man, so I had to settle for an ambulance ride to Odense, an expected travel time of 45 minutes. They drove a stretcher in through the large window section, and I said goodbye to Nanna and said to her:
It will be OK.
She smiles, cries a little, and gives me a little kiss on the mouth. Before I went into the ambulance, I met my father-in-law, who was standing by the ambulance; he said:
it will be OK work" I smile and answer, yes.
My father-in-law's saying these words makes me feel a bit at ease. He had just come through a brain hemorrhage.
The trip in the ambulance felt a bit like a trip to no man's land. I was transported away from the known, my home, towards the unknown, the hospital in Odense. I could calculate that the trip was going to go fast. According to Google Maps, 93 km to the hospital the trip usually takes 64 minutes. To begin with, I lay there and guessed how far we were. I could faintly see various things through the rear window. It quickly became boring. The thought quietly replaced the boredom that I might die. The questions piled up in my head:
Is this my last day?
Will Karl only have his father for 90 days?
What will happen to Nanna and Erik?
My thoughts were interrupted by the paramedic:
I'm just going to inject something under your tongue.
It was Glytrin, which is a remedy for heart spasms. To keep the conversation going a bit, I asked her if it tasted good. She replied that if I had asked her half a year ago, the answer would have been no, but now they had added some mint, and the taste was OK. However, she just forgot to mention the side effects, so 2 minutes later, I was in the ambulance with chest pains and a severe headache.
When we approached Odense hospital, there was a lot of dialogue between the ambulance attendant and the team waiting for me ... to be continued.
