Last night as I was sitting at the dinner table with my family, I felt a sudden pressure in the center of my chest. It wasn’t a sharp pain, characteristic of indigestion, but a dull, difficult to locate, painful squeezing sensation. Lasting less than a minute, it immediately grabbed my undivided attention. It stopped me in the middle of the sentence I was uttering and brought the entire meal to a halt.
I sat for a moment wondering what had just happened when I experienced a recurrence of this sensation. Trying to figure how to answer the concerned and perplexed looks directed at me from my family, I said that I thought it might be a good idea for me to go and sit down in the library for a while to see if whatever I was experiencing continued or went away. However before I flopped into my reading chair I stopped at the computer and called up the American Heart Association’s website to try to discover the actual symptoms of a heart attack.
What I read on the AHA website told me that I was right to be concerned; that heart attacks were not necessarily the stereotypical “grab your chest and fall unconscious to the floor” that is seen on television but that they often began with a dull, pressure in the chest that could come and go. It also gave me a number of other things to watch for, such as pain in the shoulders, arms, or jaw, and encouraged anyone thinking they were experiencing the early warning signs of a heart attack to call 911 immediately. Not having all the symptoms and not wanting to act rashly, I flopped into my chair and waited to see what happened next.
Ten somewhat uneventful minutes went by when I experienced a third episode of the mysterious, painful pressure in the chest, only this time it went up my neck and into my lower jaw. Heart attack or not, I decided that it was better to be safe than sorry and told my wife we needed to take action. She dialed 911 and within minutes the local EMTs were in our living room connecting me to a heart monitor.
One of the beauties of living in a small rural community is that you know just about everyone. The EMTs are connected to the local volunteer fire department and are largely volunteer themselves. The lieutenant paramedic in charge of the team and first through the door was our friend Bruce who, with his wife and family, is also a member of my family’s church. Bruce looked over the results printing out from the monitor and said that there were a number of pre-ventricular contractions seen. That while it was not a classic heart attack it would be best to transport me to the ER thirty miles away in Portland for a full examination.
As Bruce and his team loaded me into the ambulance, the local neighborhood was activating. From out of the darkness came running neighbors from all directions wanting to know what they could do to help. Did Polly need someone to watch Elizabeth? Did my mother want anyone to stay with her? Did Polly need someone to drive her to the hospital to meet the ambulance there? This last one was not so much asked as simply done by our dear friends Sherry and Ron, who would not only not hear of not driving Polly to the ER but would also not hear of anything less than remaining with her there for the entire seven hours of my examination, testing, and assessment.
After blood testing, x-rays, and assorted other assessments, it was determined that I in fact did not have a heart attack but that the unusual EKG results warranted further diagnostic testing to be performed by my own physician to discover their significance. Thus at just after 2:00 AM this morning, Sherry and Ron drove Polly and I back to our home in Scappoose to get some much needed sleep.
In an age and country often characterized by anonymity and people living side-by-side to one another yet not even knowing anyone’s name, it is a remarkably comforting thing to be so clearly reminded that my family and I live in a place where this is proven incontrovertibly wrong. There was never a time throughout this entire frightening episode that not only I but my entire family was not in the presence of good and true friends who would stop whatever was happening in their own lives to come to the aid of a neighbor in need. To Sherril, Mike, Chris, Tammy, Krista, Pete, Bruce and all the team at the Scappoose VFD, and most especially Ron and Sherry, my family and I offer our most sincere and, please pardon the pun, heart-felt thanks for all you are and do.
Peace and good bird watching.
