Don’t be a tough guy, better safe than sorry
Really? Me? I believe the average human reaction is something along that line, because most of us think death and heart attacks happen to other people, and they do until … until one day follows a typical plotline, out of the blue there it is, that distinctive and precarious signal.
In my personal sample, a dull upper left chest pain. More ache than pain. Nothing theatrical even though I thought it was supposed to be theatrical, not the classic vise grip, no nerve tingle in the arms and shoulders. Actually it had been a month or more since I started to notice this odd ache, this as I wrote off to muscle ache.
Then on a Monday morning, while doing something very modest, the ache localized in the center of my chest, a touch closer to the classic but still no vise grip.
Right here is the problem of being a male homo sapiens in the first place. That same sexual division that prompts women to ask for directions and men to wander off aimlessly. Home repair and a millennium of do-it-yourself books are at fault for this.
Beyond is the known statistic that 80 percent of emergency room visits are “chest pain” related, for which only 20 percent prove valid, and who wants to appear wimpy at the emergency room? We all know somewhere there is the Great Book of Maleness being kept, keeping track of wimpy behavior.
Here precisely the problem, of knowing when to pull the pin and go get advice. To admit most of us do not know our personal animal all that well, if again females are better trained to this than the average male.
Menstruation, pregnancy, birth, menopause tend to be body learning experiences. Most guys skip these lessons. As for knowing when a chest pain is real is half institutional, half intuitive. It’s a guesstimate. As said, we don’t want to appear wimpy.
Upper left side migrating to center. That day we were storing potatoes, morning started at 5:30 a.m., was about 8 a.m. when I walked over to my wife at the bin piler and said “I’m going to emergency,” tapped my chest.
Her eyes got big. “I’m OK, just think it’s time.” If maybe heart attacks are like giving birth without the certainty of the water breaking. It’s a guesstimate, a fear factor, a hunch, that precede … it’s time.
As I drove my pickup up the interstate I was already having doubts, I thought of turning around, I wasn’t at all sure, the ache, the pain wasn’t that bad, maybe this is just potato harvest anxiety? I made the turn to St. Michael’s at 10:54 a.m., parked across the street from the emergency door. Pulled the keys, walked down the ramp, at the desk announced “chest pain.”
I could almost hear their eyes rolling, another wimp. A routine quickly followed, EKG, blood tests, stress test, Echo; yup, guessed right. I have angina, heart disease.
I once believed I was immune to heart disease never mind my older brother suddenly died of it. My dad had it, my mom, my sister, my baby brother all of them collecting heart attacks like stamps. Still I thought I had a Jesus Christ heart, the kind of sacred heart thing they used to sell at the dime store.
This not-me is particular to farmers being part of our core faith is we live the last wholesome life on the planet, fresh air, exercise, lots of tractor meditation, besides I eat pretty honestly for a 21st Century adult, though I do recall with some longing the meal plan of that once and former farmhouse.
Those three squares, to include bacon, lard crust, real butter, whole milk, potatoes three times a day, red meat twice daily, full-frontal buttered popcorn two nights a week, ice cream by the jeroboam. I have largely migrated from those honored farmhouse proportions.
To admit as that farmer I don’t move fertilizer by the sack-full any more, hydraulic motors have replaced my backbone. There’s a powered post hole digger on a tractor, to cite an 80-rod length of fence by a manual posthole digger is worthy of bacon for breakfast.
As for other jobs, there is probably a skid steer designed to fit. Once I hand-sewed a thousand 100 burlap sacks per day, we loaded trucks with hand carts.
Now, the farm has a forklift at every other corner. Add ATVs. While we will harvest 6 million pounds of potatoes, 4 million pounds of sweet corn, 20 million of field corn, to include peas, oats, soybeans and not hardly lift a finger.
So much for the myth of exercise in modern agriculture, seems we need a treadmill as much as the guy in a suit and tie.
I am at this moment no longer a cath-virgin. I have my own stent, my balloon job. A surprisingly simple process of running that choke cable up your arm or leg, make the turn, worm into the coronary arteries. What surprised me was the immediate effect, in minutes I felt the difference.
Later when the doctor queried of my family history, I told him that nature intends to keep a strict human balance based on my family line.
Never mind we did suffer the fashion of Old Order Methodists where smoking was actually outlawed long before the Surgeon General thought the same. Same for alcohol. On these attributes alone, we ought have been destined to live a thousand years, only to mention I didn’t have my first French fry till high school.
I have come to think kindly of heart disease, of Mother Nature doing some basic math we’d rather not do to ourselves.