We Are Not Alone

I found a new friend this week....he's like me.  Really like me, except not quite.   He is a guy.  We both survived Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) and survived it with minimal damage.  It seems neither of us has any brain damage - a horrifyingly small club.  So we have all that in common; we are SCA survivors and we are very, very lucky.
We both live on the coast; we were scuba divers; we both used to have very low resting heart rates.  He is braver than I am; he has continued to dive since having the SCA and since having the defibrillator implanted.  I can't bring myself to do it.
 We are both in our 50's, we are single.  We have been athletes, though he much more so than me.  We  have defibrillators implanted in our chest walls, we are both bright and we sometimes struggle to make sense of all of this.  Mostly, again, we are alive and we are fighting fear.  We're both determined not to succumb to fear, in spite of the very scary fact that there is something wrong with our hearts that 'they' cannot fix.  All they can do is stick some goddamn box in there to shock the crap out of our hearts when the rhythms go haywire.  We are often grateful, and sometimes we're just pissed off.  We both know people who wildly abuse their bodies with tobacco, alcohol, etc. and apparently have hearts that chug along very nicely. We know it's a waste to even think about that, but every now and then.....

We are both terrifically frustrated by the lack of data, by the lack of clear, certain information about why this happened, about what our futures hold.  His present is even more unsettled than mine, so he probably feels greater pressure for answers. My defibrillator has not fired in now almost two years - and his has fired many, many times.  Sometimes appropriately, sometimes not.  I sympathize with him while being very selfishly frightened of the prospect of that happening to me.  Thinking about Skippy shocking my heart - either once or repeatedly - is almost too frightening for me to envision.  So I don't.  Or I try not to.

One other stark difference was our initial responses to the SCA.  We both awoke to unknown cardiologists telling us our new story and then telling us that because of our good health (aside from the stopping hearts, of course) and the lack of clarity on the cause and the future events, we needed to have defibrillators implanted immediately.  Being the girl,  I thought - sure.  Put the damn thing in. It was my insurance policy.
My new friend - the guy - reacted differently.  In his eyes, the lack of explanation and prognosis was not a reason to stick some foreign object in his chest wall with leads running into his heart ready to give shocks.  Instead, he walked out of the hospital without the defibrillator and would not get it implanted for another year.  A whole year.  We are the same and we are different.

I am so glad to have met him; on our first call, we talked the better part of an hour.
We both see this life of ours as struggling to find the right role for fear, to find the balance between being rational about the fact that the heart has taken to stopping and we have defibrillators in our respective chest walls.  We need to be rational about that, but both of us refuse to let fear dominate our lives.  We don't want to be stupid, but we can't be timid or overrun by it.  Every person on earth faces this balance, but if you toss SCA into the mix, the line between the two moves around.  It is a struggle to sort out which are fears to be overcome and which are the ones that we need to heed and adjust our choices.

I have a new friend.  As I said to him, I am so glad to know he is out there.  Alive.  Not terrified.  Living a life.

Not alone.  Company feels wonderful today.  This is gratitude.
(I would never have met him without the Cardiac Arrest website (Inspire.com).  If you have found this blog because you searched for information on SCA, I encourage you to visit inspire. And if you are reading this because you are a friend, thank you.)