Altered States - Part 2: Before

This is the second instalment of a 9-part blog series written by Rob.
Trigger Warning: series contains references to: medical issues; surgery; stress; anxiety; depression; and trauma.

It had been a stressful few months.

It turned out it was more stressful than I could have realised. In spring 2018, having been generally in pretty good health – cycling, swimming, even running my first 10k not long before - like a bolt from the blue, I suddenly found out that I needed an operation on my heart. Like I said, I was healthy, this shouldn’t be happening to me. I was in my mid-30’s, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink a huge amount, exercised a lot and here I was, luckily or unluckily depending which way you look at it, finding out purely by chance that I needed my heart fixing as a bit of a bloody priority.

Turns out without having any idea, I’d made it well into my 30’s with a hole in my heart. And we’re not talking a small pin-prick puncture. We’re talking a 2cm diameter hole in the wall of one of the upper chambers of my flipping heart! You know, that vital organ we all have that keeps blood and oxygen pumping and generally keeps us alive. And the ruddy big hole had caused part of my heart to grow bigger than it should which also doesn’t sound great. So that was a pretty big surprise. And then I found out I’d need open heart surgery. And that would mean weeks recovering in intensive care and all sounded rather terrifying and serious. In hindsight I can joke and at the time I tried to make light of it to ease my mind, but like a true romantic I was literally just too big-hearted and at high risk of dying from a broken heart.

So yeah, there were a few things playing on my mind.

The doctors were all very nice and said it probably wasn’t going to kill me in the next few days or weeks, but it would definitely cause me big issues at some point if it wasn’t sorted. Fun problems like blood clots on the brain, having a stroke or good old-fashioned death. They said I could have a couple of months to enjoy the summer, but that it was a good idea to have the operation later that year. To keep me alive and all that stuff.

Oh. Then I found out 2 months later I needed to have a different operation to repair dual hernia’s I’d developed, probably from doing lots of bastard exercise. And that would have to be done before the heart surgery. So, my autumn schedule was starting to get fairly booked up.

All in all, it had been what you might call ‘an interesting period in my life’. It’s fair to say having not been through anything like this before, I was generally petrified. I’d spent some time in hospitals for relatively minor ailments - broken and dislocated bones, tests, mild illness, but never had anaesthetic or gone under the knife. It was all becoming a lot more stressful than I could have imagined. And this was before I’d even had any operations. Turns out, the thought of dying during one of these operations was pretty firmly lodged in my mind and unbeknownst to me, I may have developed some health anxiety in childhood.

Autumn rolled around, and the ops began. First it was the hernias in October. I was still terrified up until the moment I lost consciousness on the hospital table.  It went pretty well apart from the pain in recovery and nearly blacking out for no reason the night after the operation. It was quite a relief to come round after and not have died on the table. Or to have found out they’d somehow messed up and accidentally given me a lobotomy or replaced my legs with my arms and vice versa. Those kind of standard worries that overthinking can lead to.

Then 5 weeks later, I went in for the big one. Luckily, it turns out the doctor had been wrong, and my heart could be fixed without full open-heart surgery, which was a relief but the emotional damage was already done and I was still scared to death. I think as soon as anyone says they’re going to be tinkering with your ticker, it does something to us mentally and deep in our psyche or soul. It’s the source of life, one of the most vital organs and has so much emotion connected to it. The thought of entrusting it to someone else and letting them prod, poke and play around with it, is spiritually quite troubling. The fact medical experts could interpret scans and imaging incorrectly to the extent they nearly cracked my chest open didn’t exactly fill me with confidence either.

The heart op went well and fixed what I considered to be the absolutely massive hole I didn’t know had been there. But I had some complications in the following weeks that saw me rush to A&E with my heartbeat racing at 180bpm for about 8 hours. This happened a few more times which was terrifying. Without cause or reason, my heart would just decide to start beating out of rhythm and incredibly fast in something called ‘atrial fibrillation’. It would literally switch from being perfectly normal, to going haywire the next beat. Not ideal when your doctors have told you to rest up and recover and definitely not to overly exert yourself before your heart heals. And I then had to have another general anaesthetic for another procedure just a few weeks later. If hospitals had a loyalty programme, I would have been swimming in bonus points.

The stress of all these hospital visits and procedures was taking a toll mentally. I just didn’t know it. With hindsight, therapy, and lots of reading, I now understand that this was all highly traumatic and etching trauma into my psyche.

Physically I was recovering, and the operations had gone well, but mentally I was struggling. Christmas 2018 rolled around, and I was feeling pretty terrible. I’d never experienced anything like this. Logically I should have been ecstatic. I’d been saved from the jaws of death and survived two operations I thought were sure to kill me. But everything had taken a toll, and I was anxious, not sleeping properly and generally feeling pretty low. OK. That’s an understatement. I felt absolutely awful. Tearful all the time. Deflated. Drained. Depressed. Exhausted. Alone. Helpless.  As low as low can be.

But that’s the prologue and a bit of context. Back to the day everything changed.