Anger

One of the things people pause to ask me when I tell my story about the aortic dissection is “Wait they just let you go after the A&E visit?”.

Anger

CW: Physical abuse

One of the things people pause to ask me when I tell my story about the aortic dissection is “Wait they just let you go after the A&E visit?”.

When I had what we now know was my initial aortic dissection, I was 29 years old. I went blind, delusional, and vomited all over the inside of an ambulance (and on my wife, thanks). I came back around 24 hours in the acute ward at hospital.

Not long after my sight came back and I started making more coherent sense, two doctors came into my bay and kicked my wife out. The first question they asked was “What drugs did you take?”, and when I naively and honestly replied “Ibuprofen”, they just went “Yeah really sure man”. They didn’t believe me, and somehow after losing 2 urine samples which would have proven that what I said was true, they let me go.

I remember it so clearly. Their faces as they spoke, the bed with bread crumbs in from where I was trying to eat blind and delusional, the curtained bay that cocooned where I had been all night while my wife sat next to me worried. I wasn’t angry at the time, or later once I found out I needed to have the surgery. Everyone else around me was angry on my behalf, but it seemed silly to complain or bring it up. Sure I /could/ have died, but I was one of the lucky few who didn’t. I guess they were lucky as well.

When I went back to A&E 2 weeks later with a heart rate peaking between 150 and 220, I sat in the waiting room for hours to be told I had anxiety by the cardiologist who was working that evening. Despite asking questions and feeling unwell, I accepted it, I wasn’t angry. Maybe it would just go away, and I would rather be at home. A&E is not a fun place after 9pm.

For 4 months I repeatedly went to the doctors to complain about chest pains, and just general weird things going on with my heart. I was told it was stomach acid by multiple doctors. I regularly see one of the doctors who did this. He asks me how I’m doing as if he’s a friend. And I understand that the metrics and insights we have from millions of other patients say that I am very much not the person this would happen to. A belief in what I’m saying from people would have gone a long way. But I’m still not angry about it. How could I be, I survived.

When I was 10, my mother hit me in the face while my family sat at the dinner table. She threatened to run away for the dozenth time. While my nose bled and I sat crying, she performed her scene for the family. A short time after, while I watched my parents shout on the drive from my brother's window, I called 999. I got put through to a woman asking me what was wrong. Through my sobbing and laboured intake, I told her my mother was threatening to leave. She listened for a moment, and then said “Just go and speak to her, I am sure it will all be fine.”. That does make me angry, because 20 years later I feel I only just survived it.

Today is my 31st birthday. Every year I think back to that moment. I don’t really know why my brain has made this association, the only relation it has is it happened in the darkness of winter. It makes me do want to do nothing for my birthday, I would rather just be silent.

I could blame it on any number of things. But it’s my inability to let go that keeps me here. When I live in the memories of my heart surgery, there are moments that till bring me close to tears. It has gotten a lot better, everything has, and I am rapidly learning to let go. I have a privileged life I get to live in with a wonderful partner. But I live with the first hand experience that if people had trusted and believed others more, so much of everything could just be avoided. That lack of trust in people makes me angry.

There are advantages to heart surgery, one of which is having an “aortaversary” in the other half of the year in the sun. I think that will be my new birthday instead.