Diagnosis: Heart Attack

Content

Imprint

Dedication

Diagnosis: Heart Attack

Back from China

Ground Zero

November 2011–January 2012 Neurological Clinic, Bavarian Alps

January–March 2012 Lake Constance Rehabilitation Center

March–May 2012 Helios Clinic, Thurgau, Switzerland

Back to life

Appointment with Mrs. Heinz on Sunday, July 22, 2012

And then Brigitte came into our lives

Shanghai

Examination at the ophthalmologist

Break down

Hitting Rock Bottom – January 2015

Dubai

Munich

4th seizure 2015

Epilogue

Imprint

All rights of distribution, also through movies, radio and television, photomechanical reproduction, sound carrier, electronic medium and reprinting in excerpts are reserved.

© 2016 novum publishing

ISBN print edition: 978-3-95840-181-5

ISBN e-book: 978-3-95840-182-2

Translated from German into English by Karla Weller

Cover photo: www.pixabay.com

Coverdesign, layout & typesetting: novum publishing

Images: Karla Weller (5), Picture 3: Dawn Hudson | Dreamstime.com

www.novum-publishing.co.uk

Dedication

Based on a True Story

Dedicated to Gerd,

The strongest of Hearts,

The bravest of Souls.

Diagnosis: Heart Attack

“Every day, on which I work toward fulfilling the purpose of my existence and my promise to God, I draw more love into my life. Love conquers all and miracles occur.”

Jana Haas May 1, 2011

July 31, 2011

I had been awaiting this day with discontent and restlessness for a few weeks now. So much would change today. Justin would turn sixteen and on the same day, Daniela would fly to Chicago to start her internship abroad. Although I was happy for both of our children, melancholy filled my heart. Of course I knew I had to let them go.

“Those who aren’t prepared for change will also lose that which they wish to preserve.”

Gustav Heinemann (1899–1976), German politician (SPD), 1969–74 German president

Even though I was well aware of the truth lying in those wise words, I sensed something about today was even more than our children’s growing independence.

The whole family was standing outside the house at eight in the morning. Daniela’s suitcases had already been loaded into the SUV when she gave her brother one last hug. Just at the right moment, the neighbors’ daughter came running across the street to take a farewell picture of the four of us with her cell phone. Then we headed out.

My husband, Gerd, and I took Daniela to the airport in Zurich. We arrived early and had plenty of time to drink a cappuccino together before she went through the security gate. One last wave and she had vanished out of our sight. Daniela was going to do an internship in Chicago for the next six months before she would complete her bachelor’s degree in Germany.

On the drive home, Gerd was steering the wheel while he kept saying, “She’ll be fine, she’s going her own way now. That’s great.” I had the feeling he was really trying to convince himself because, in reality, he didn’t like the idea of his little girl finally leaving her parents’ home and being on her own for a few months at all. He had always been the one to travel for months at a time because his job demanded it. He needed his family to manage without him then. But now that it was “his little girl” who was leaving the nest, it was a completely new situation that clearly unsettled him.

I was very happy for Daniela and was certain the six months would fly by, but I still had this strange feeling that something had come to an end today.

A few days later, Gerd was already off on another business trip. One of his many projects was constantly taking him around the world; I often didn’t even know what city he was in.

Our son Justin was in 9th grade and I worked in the office at a medium-sized company. While Justin spent most of his free time with his friends, I enjoyed a few nice autumn days taking little excursions with my mother. Occasionally, we would have coffee in the sun at a café on Lake Constance and were always thrilled when we would get an email from Daniela on our cell phones. That always made us feeling close to her; as though we were part of her life, although she was miles away. I had very little contact with Gerd and it was usually brief. He extended his stay in China several times because the project required more time and work than planned. But isn’t that how it had always been? I didn’t really think much about it.

Gerd and Daniela, however, skyped almost every day. Due to the time difference, they often met online when Gerd returned to his hotel in the evening and Daniela was getting ready for work in the morning. So, one day, Daniela told me she was worried about her dad. For weeks, he had been complaining about a cold, bronchitis and a fever, but stoically refused to see a doctor. By email, I suggested he consult a traditional Chinese pharmacist. Or maybe Gerd could find a doctor who worked with Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture. Still, Gerd refused and pointed out that his Chinese employees brought him freshly brewed tea every day, with the words “Good for your health! Good for your health!” and that his condition would improve soon. Well then, from his mouth to God’s ears. He was, after all, an adult and had done just fine alone abroad for nearly 20 years, so he was fully capable of making his own decisions.

After all, I had quite enough to deal with at home. My job as a CEO’s assistant was demanding and continuously provided me new challenges. Justin had to be taken care of and last but not least, there was always plenty to do in and around the house. I preferred to spend what little free time I had at home reading books. For quite some time now, a dear friend of mine had been giving me books from Sanaya Roman and Jana Haas.

But my favorite author remained Louise L. Hay. I repeatedly read her books and still could find deep truth in her words every time.

“Everything I ever need to know reveals to me at divine time in perfect ways.”

Louise L. Hay

Back from China

On the second-to-last weekend in October, the time had come and Gerd finally returned from China. His plane landed on Friday and he had arranged to spend the weekend at a vineyard with old school friends starting on Saturday, which meant that he would put his suitcase down at home one day, just to leave for Freiburg the next morning. The fact that he still wasn’t feeling well couldn’t stop him from going.

On Sunday afternoon, he came back from his trip and went straight to the soccer field to say hi to his friends and fellow players from the athletics club.

On Monday, he appeared on time for work at the machine manufacturing plant where he had worked for 21 years, only to learn he would have to travel to another customer the very next day.

Since there was an event taking place at my company at the same time, I called him on Tuesday at five in the afternoon to tell him I would be going out with the other conference attendees that evening. He was just on his way from the office to the company parking lot and I heard the rattling of his laptop trolley’s wheels, which he dragged behind him as he told me, fouriously, how angry he was that he was being sent to this customer far up in East Germany because, supposedly, no one else could do the job. He completely refused to understand this decision. After all, he had just spent seven weeks in China and someone had to have been handling the customer in Thuringia while he was gone! The choice to send him there now remained a complete mystery to him. The colleague assigned to accompany him also demanded that he take him to Ikea on the way up there so he could buy a desk there for his son who was studying in Karlsruhe. That meant the long drive to Thuringia would be even longer due to the stop at the home-center and the detour to Karlsruhe. Gerd just couldn’t calm down.

After about ten minutes, we ended the conversation and I set off to the meeting with my foreign colleagues. In order to save time, I decided to take a narrow country lane right through the woods. But after a short distance, I had to stop and turn the car around, because a huge tree, obviously struck by a lightning, blocked my way. Seeing the mighty tree beaten by raw forces of nature, left me feeling rather uneasy, so I turned around and drove on the regular street now.

Since my colleagues wanted to freshen up in their hotel rooms first, I was still alone in the restaurant when my phone rang. It was Justin, saying. “Mom, dad is lying down on the floor here, gasping for air!”

Ground Zero

For the next five hours, paramedics, emergency doctors and surgeons fought hard to keep Gerd alive. The rescue helicopter had landed on the soccer field near our home, but couldn’t carry him because Gerd’s heart wouldn’t have been able to withstand the pressure equalization. At least they were able to provide him with nitroglycerin as an emergency medication. A remedy which every rescue helicopter is supposed to keep on board.

Nitroglycerin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Nitroglycerin (NG), also known as nitroglycerine, trinitroglycerin (TNG), trinitroglycerine, nitro, glyceryl trinitrate (GTN), or 1,2,3-trinitroxypropane, is a heavy, colorless, oily, explosiv liquid most commonly produced by nitrating glycerol with white fuming nitric acid under conditions appropriate to the formation of the nitric acid ester. Chemically, the substance is an organic nitrate compound rather than a nitro compound, yet the traditional name is often retained.

For over 130 years, nitroglycerin has been used medically as a potent vasodilator to treat heart conditions, such as angina pectoris and chronic heart failure. Though it was previously known that these beneficial effects are due to nitroglycerin being converted to nitric oxide, a potent vasodilator, it was not until 2002 that the enzyme for this conversion was discovered to be mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase.[4] Nitroglycerin is available in sublingual tablets, sprays, and patches.[5]

I now drove from the restaurant to the district hospital right away, where I waited together with my brother-in-law for the ambulance to arrive which seemed to take forever. From the parking lot, I could see hospital staff standing on the ramp and almost an hour later, I walked over to them to ask when my husband might be expected. First, no one would tell me anything, until finally they said, “This can take a long time. If he even makes it at all!”

When the ambulance finally arrived, I could see from afar that the emergency doctor inside the van was standing up and performing CPR because, even after several resuscitation attempts with the defibrillator, Gerd’s condition still wasn’t stable.

The ambulance doors opened and I could see the entire team was completely exhausted. Sweat poured from the men’s foreheads and trickled down their faces. When the stretcher was pushed out of the vehicle, I finally caught a glimpse of Gerd’s body. His orange-striped shirt had been cut open, his bare torso was hooked up to wires, and I couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not. I wanted to run towards him, but paramedics stopped me. They told me, I wasn’t allowed to accompany the patient, but instead had to wait in the emergency room until someone would come to get me. My brother-in-law, Peter, followed me inside the hospital.

While my sister Beate and her husband, Hardy, had stayed home with Justin, Peter had driven to the hospital to be there for me. Now he told me in detail what had happened since Justin’s phone call.

Because he hadn’t been able to reach our general practitioner, Justin kept his wits together and immediately notified 911 before he started mouth-to-mouth and CPR right away.

Since my sister lived in our neighborhood, I tried to call her on my cell from the restaurant, hoping she could help in any way. I had just switched from my old telephone to a modern touch-screen and I found it difficult to use. At first, I didn’t know how to open the window, couldn’t find the contacts folder and I felt like throwing the stupid thing from the mountain terrace where I stood at that point. But finally I was able to handle it so that the four of them met on the street at our house at nearly the same time: my two sisters and their husbands. While Sigi and Beate showed the two ambulances and the emergency doctor their way, Peter and Hardy, both trained first responders, performed first aid. Justin had already bedded his father on a thick floor pillow and was continuously blowing air into his mouth and nose. But Peter and Hardy realized Gerd was clinically dead at that point. His eyes were open wide and bulging, his mouth was slack and open and they couldn’t find a pulse in his neck. The emergency doctor used the defibrillator several times, oxygen was pumped into Gerd’s lungs and, after more than an hour, Gerd was finally carried into the ambulance. Yet they couldn’t leave for the hospital now, because Gerd’s heart kept stopping several times.

Out on the street, my sisters had overheard a phone call between the emergency doctor and the chief physician at the hospital, who instructed him to cease resuscitation at a certain point. But he wouldn’t obey. Maybe he simply couldn’t disappoint Justin, who had fought inexorably to keep his father alive and had never stopped trying to resuscitate him.

A few hours later in the hospital stairwell, I happened to run into the emergency doctor who had led the rescue effort. We had never met before, but recognized each other in this awkward situation. He abruptly stopped on the stairs, looked at me and told me, in a few brief words, that Gerd had suffered a massive heart attack. The whole team had done everything they could. Even on their way to the hospital, they had to stop the ambulance several times to resume life-saving measures. What happened next was entirely in God’s hands. He looked at me silently for quite some time. I didn’t say anything, didn’t ask any questions. He was still clearly exhausted. Then, as though giving me confirmation of his words, he handed me the certificate he had issued:

Myocardial infarction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Myocardial infarction (MI) or acute myocardial infarction (AMI), commonly known as a heart attack, occurs when blood flow stops to a part of the heart causing damage to the heart muscle. The most common symptom is chest pain or discomfort which may travel into the shoulder, arm, back, neck, or jaw. Often it is in the center or left side of the chest and lasts for more than a few minutes. The discomfort may occasionally feel like heartburn. Other symptoms may include shortness of breath, nausea, feeling faint, a cold sweat, or feeling tired.[1] About 30 % of people have atypical symptoms,[2] with women more likely than men to present atypically.[3] Among those over 75 years old, about 5 % have had an MI with little or no history of symptoms.[4] An MI may cause heart failure, an irregular heartbeat, or cardiac arrest.[5][6]

In contrast, the definition according to Louise L. Hay’s “little blue book” named YOU CAN HEAL YOUR LIFE, says

Squeezing all the joy out of the heart in favor of money or position, etc.

While my brother-in-law waited for news from the doctors, I went down to see the hospital’s administration to register. They asked me countless questions which I was only partly able to answer. Of course, I knew all of Gerd’s personal information, but couldn’t tell his insurance number or all the other details which were obviously desperately needed in case of emergency. The on-duty clerk looked at me uncomprehendingly, when at one point to my own dismay I simply couldn’t stand this endless question and answer game any longer and just blurted out that I didn’t even know if my husband was still alive and that I wasn’t willing to continue this questionnaire any longer.

Instead of showing some understanding, he ordered me to finish the admission file anyway! Just then, another hospital employee joined us. She sensed the strained situation and my emotional condition instinctively, and called to inquire about my husband.

Despite several attempts, she wasn’t able to reach anyone. “Look, everyone is obviously working hard in the shock room to keep your husband alive. That’s why no one had time to answer the phone. You will have to remain patient.”

Definition according to Wikipedia:

A shock room, also called a reanimation room,[1] is a component of emergency rooms in hospitals in Europe[2]. It serves as primary care unit for trauma patients and patients with polytrauma. Emergency patients with problems pertaining to internal medicine are not usually treated there, which delineates the concept from that of an American emergency room.[2]

At 11 p.m., Gerd was being moved to the intensive care unit. In all these hours filled with fear and terrifying uncertainty, none of the clinic personnel had given me any information about his serious condition. Through a sliding door just opening at that very moment, I could only catch a glimpse of a gurney with a critical patient being pushed by. And even now, I still wasn’t allowed to stay by his side. His body was connected to tubes and needed artificial respiration.

Finally, a doctor explained to me that a stent was inserted into his coronal artery, and they would be keeping Gerd in a medically induced coma for the next two or three days, and we would just have to wait and see what happens.

So without even having seen Gerd, Peter and I were sent back home where my whole family had gathered in the kitchen. Justin had heated up the beef stew Gerd had cooked the evening before. They were supposed to eat something in order to keep their strength up. “Food is also soothing the soul,” we always said.

Everyone except for me, had seen Gerd before he was taken to the hospital and no one had really expected him to still be alive. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any good news to tell now. After all, I hadn’t even been allowed to be with him!

To carry Gerd out of the house hours before, a glass door had to be removed in the stairwell. Unfortunately, one of the paramedics had crushed his finger and injured himself during his attempt to help. So this door was leaning against the wall on the second floor now and when cleaning up the rescue area, which was strewn with packaging material from the numerous devices and disposable syringes, the door started to slip, slammed against a corner and burst into a million glass pellets. Those glass pellets sprang from the upper level, through the open staircase straight down to the cellar and hid in every corner and even in every shoe on the shelf on the wall.

After the initial fright, my sisters were almost glad to have something to clean up again just to break the uncomfortable silence and tension left due to the trembling uncertainty regarding Gerd’s condition.

The next morning at five, Gerd’s cell phone rang. The phone was placed next to my bed in case the hospital called. However, it was his colleague calling to ask where Gerd was, as they were supposed to drive to Thuringia. I felt like I had just fallen asleep. I was nauseated and hadn’t been able to get any rest due to my fear and worry about my husband, so I tersely told him Gerd was in the hospital after suffering a heart attack.

There was no reaction on the other end of the line; perhaps he thought it was a bad joke.

I would have liked to have said more, especially about the argument he had had with Gerd about the detour to Ikea. But what was the point? Could I really blame a colleague for Gerd’s heart attack? Instead, we both hung up.

When I went to visit Gerd later that morning, he was all stretched out, completely still, on the hospital bed. The machines issued their regular noises, but otherwise, the room was filled with silence. Gerd had been put in a single room at the far end of the hall in the intensive care unit. They wanted to make sure it was quiet around him for the next few days so his body could recover from the trauma.

When Gerd still hadn’t woken up on the fourth day in a row, I asked the attending physician about this circumstance. He explained to me that a period of two to three days of recovery was simply based on estimation. No one could tell whether or when Gerd would ever wake up. All they knew for sure was he had survived the night although predicted otherwise.

I was completely unaware his prognosis was so bad, and now those bold words hit me hard! An excruciating pain shot right through my heart as the floor broke away beneath me.

The next night, something scared me deeply and I awoke with a startle, knowing something bad had happened to Gerd. I listened to hear if the telephone was ringing, but no one had called.

Early in the morning, I drove to the hospital and hurried to Gerd’s bed. The equipment was still incessantly performing its duties; the numbers on the monitors hadn’t changed. But Gerd was running a fever and his right thigh was swollen like a balloon.

The operation during which the stent was inserted via the femoral artery near the groin had apparently caused internal bleeding which had gone unnoticed. And if that wasn’t a big enough threat, I also had to worry he might suffer brain damage from the high fever. At a body temperature of 106 degrees, the brain swells and presses against the skull. To prevent this, they would lower his temperature with cold, wet cloths spread out across his bare torso. It made him look eerie and somewhat like a mummy.

At the same time, the windows in the hospital room stood wide open! When I asked the nurses about it they explained to me that fresh air was very important for the entire ward! And since visiting hours weren’t until the afternoon, I wasn’t even allowed to be here at this early hour!

Fresh air? Certainly! But foggy, cold, wet air on an late October day while the patient was lying naked and immobile with a fever?

I stood by Gerd’s bed and tears of anger, fear and helplessness ran down my face. I knew this was a matter of life and death for Gerd. Did he have the will to return to this world or had he already chosen to move on to the next? I had brought a small guardian angel made of rose quartz which I laid in his folded hands. I also had the Abaris1 arrow with me to provide him with even more healing energy. Unfortunately, I was only allowed to stay with him for a few minutes because my presence in the morning supposedly disrupted the station’s work flow.

1 Energy Stick for Healing Support

The next day, Gerd had bilateral pneumonia. His fever still hadn’t gone down and the doctors were considering opening his skull to give his brain more room.

As on the days prior, I performed different Jin Shin Jiutsu techniques, an old Chinese healing current, to activate Gerd’s animal spirits and harmonize his vital flows. His body was ice cold from the wet cloths and it was a miracle his blood was still circulating at all.

Many desperate hours later, his fever eventually went down and his skull didn’t have to be opened. But no one could tell if his brain had suffered additional damage. I feared more and more for his life when I suddenly realized that Gerd would no longer wake up from the coma on his own volition.

In my unbridled despair I prayed to God and asked for the very best outcome and Gerd’s best interest, when I pulled the card “Breathe” from Doreen Virtue’s Archangel Oracle Deck. This was the ultimate answer to my prayer, and I put the picture of Archangel Raphael next to Gerd’s bed right away. From now on, Raphael himself would watch over him and remind his lungs to keep breathing deeply and constantly.

At that point, a nurse asked me to take home Gerd’s golden necklace with the Jesus pendant which I had placed over his bed earlier. But I wanted to leave it right there since Gerd had worn it around his neck for years. He had bought it in Mexico a long time ago and never taken it off since. Two weeks later, the chain had disappeared and no one knew where it had gone. May it bring its new owner luck and protection!

Justin hadn’t visited his father at intensive care yet. He had fought so desperately to keep him alive during the heart attack, but still wasn’t able to face his father’s lifeless body in the hospital. Every night, Justin lay awake in bed and barely talked during the day. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw his father’s face in pain, fighting with death, and therefore he couldn’t get any sleep.

To improve the situation for everybody, I decided to get in touch with my daughter, Daniela, who was still in Chicago and asked her to fly home as soon as possible to join her brother visiting their father. That was the only chance I saw to bring Gerd back.

But first, Justin urgently needed help. He couldn’t handle the situation alone. He had already had too many sleepless nights. We made an appointment with Mrs. Sigler who worked as a shaman and had helped me personally deal with a life crisis before.

On a soul journey, she was able to discover that Justin’s personal spirit animal was a giant bear. Because of the shock he had experienced, some fear had settled in his head, which immediately dissolved when his spirit animal made itself known. Inner strength and self-confidence could once again blossom. The Archangel Raphael gave him Aesculapius’s staff and Justin would have to decide for himself whether to accept it or not. Being a helper and healer was his destiny.

On October 31, Daniela returned from Chicago and, as planned, the siblings visited their father in the intensive care unit for the first time. I waited outside. The three of them had such a special connection which I didn’t want to disturb because I knew if anyone at all could move Gerd to come back, it was his children.

Unfortunately, the desired success didn’t happen right away. After a few initial hesitations, the two of them spoke to their father as though he were awake. They told him of the past few days, how much he had scared them, how furious Daniela was that he hadn’t listened to her and consulted a doctor while there was still time to take action, and anything else they could think of at the moment. But Gerd didn’t wake up and didn’t give any other indication he even recognized his children were there with him.

Fourteen days after the heart attack, I was called into the doctor’s office. They had to cease artificial respiration, they explained, because if the tube remained in his throat for too long, his vocal cords would be likely to suffer permanent damage. And what would happen if the breathing tube was removed and Gerd would fail to breathe on his own? Should doctors perform a tracheotomy in a worst-case scenario?

Since Gerd had never filed a living will, I had to see a notary to obtain a legal permit from the authorities to make decisions on Gerd’s behalf.

Due to the life and death situation, the notary offered me an appointment the very next day and after a long conversation, issued the necessary paperwork which temporarily authorized me to order life support measures for my husband.

That same day, Gerd’s oxygen tube was removed and artificial respiration was stopped. I stood, spellbound, next to his bed and watched the procedure. Everything went well and Gerd was able to breathe on his own! Thank God! A first essential step toward returning to life had been taken.

From then on, Gerd was able to make loud noises, but they sounded more like a threatened wild animal than a human being. In retrospect, I think his consciousness returned successively, but he was completely terrified and distraught, still caught somewhere in between the worlds. The doctors didn’t know how to deal with him either, so whenever he became too anxious “for his own protection”, he was administered a drug that plunged him back into complete darkness. For the very moment, this practice was certainly a relief for everybody, especially for the people around him who were frightened by these primal noises. But not for the long-term, because this forced him to go through this semi-conscious state again and again.

We kept trying to think of ways to encourage Gerd to come back to life.

Meanwhile, we had burned a CD for him with a few songs that might mean something to him. There were songs he had loved to listen to the year before and songs he had sung loudly with his friends at a party at a soccer camp in Croatia. Somehow, we all saw that film scene in our minds when the hero suddenly opens his eyes because he hears a certain melody and the happy ending is in sight. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

Still, I put the book “Stand up” from Boris Grundl on the shelf next to Gerd’s hospital bed. Only a few months ago, we had attended an inspiring lecture at which Boris Grundl impressively demonstrated how he had found a new and even better life when he became paraplegic, which he had initially felt was the end of the world. If Gerd woke up, he should be immediately reminded of that and realize that people can start over, especially after such a bitter twist of fate.

One day later, I wanted to visit Gerd late in the evening, but was not allowed to see him. He was very restless and was being treated by two nurses. I was asked to be patient and wait outside in the station’s waiting room. Unfortunately, this happened again and again. When Gerd grew restless, he was given another dose of a sedative that put him back into the artificial coma. So we could never tell how much of his unconsciousness was caused by the artificial coma. How strong were his will and power to return to this life? Where did one stop and the other begin? I was told this was best for him because such massive restlessness might additionally harm his psyche and he might injure himself thrashing about in his bed. To avoid injuries, he had been “strapped” to the bed when I came to visit quite often. Seeing him like that just broke my heart.