roomies

[eor]

While I was in the hospital I had three roommates, that's what happens when you stick around for a week.

My first roommate was a man in his 50's who was more or less 5 months along from my situation.  He had a heart attack, got stent(s), went to cardiac rehab, and a few months after leaving rehab had suffered a recurrence of symptoms (fatigue, tightness in chest, etc).  After a series of tests, the doctor gently told him to relax.  Since finishing rehab he wasn't getting the positive feedback on his health that he had been getting previously.  Left to his own devices, he started to worry about little things, which then became big things.  The doctor said this was very common in young people who had heart attacks (in this context, young is pre-retirment age).  Lesson: if you pay too close attention to how your heart feels, it will oblige you and freak you the heck out.  He was discharged with advice to work with his primary care physician and maybe see a therapist for how to stop worrying about it.

The second roommate was a classic Maine old guy.  I have no idea how old, because they sound the same from 12 to 100, but my guess is he was closer the the latter than the former.  Listening him was to harken back in time to when people in Maine talked like Mainers.  I heard him at one point on the phone lamenting every selling his skidder (skidah).  The nurse who transferred him in tipped off the floor nurse that he was gruff, but really a sweetheart.  He came in complaining right off that he didn't want a room with a roommate.  Well, the reason he didn't want a roommate was that he was concerned he would be "a bother."  He was there simply because he'd stopped.  Stopped taking his pills.  Stopped eating.  Just stopped.  The funny thing is, you've probably never encountered a more positive guy.  If he was asked to do something he didn't want to do, at first he'd resist, then he'd say, "Do we really have to do that?  Well, if it has to be, it has to be, let's get it done."  And he was happy to be alive and thanked the nurses regularly for helping him recover.  And recover he did, he got strong enough that he was transferred to a less monitored floor.

My final roommate was a resident of Portland through and through.  He waited tables at a high end restaurant, went to the gym six days a week, was an actor, and was going to be working on a screenplay someday.  If he were to move from Portland, I imagine he'd have to go to New York.  He had fainted at the gym, made an appointment with his primary care physician, then collapsed at that appointment.  That earned him a trip to the hospital.  The top and bottom of his heart weren't working in tandem.  So where I had high blood pressure and high pulse at my admission.  He had very low blood pressure and pulse at his.  One of the cardiologists explained at one point, there are two groups of cardiologists: the plumbers and the electricians.  The plumbers take care of plugged pipes (arteries).  The electricians take care of problems in the wiring (nerves that fire the hear muscle).  This roommate ended up getting a pacemaker.  The bad thing about electrical problems is they can kill you before you have a chance to get to the hospital.  The good thing about getting a pacemaker is that there is no rehab, no long list of medications, you walk out the door and resume your normal life.