Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [31]
I started working at a local catering and event-planning firm and found the work very satisfying. I also found a place to stay—a co-worker was just moving in with her boyfriend and needed someone to care for her own house in the suburbs of Baltimore. Eventually I began dating again—Tom, a young chef I worked with. He was everything my ex-husband was not: mellow, unassuming, and unconcerned with class or monetary status. Since we worked together, we kept our relationship quiet at first, but finally moved in together after a year of dating.
It was soon after my divorce was made final, on the morning of my twenty-ninth birthday, and I was getting ready for work. Tom had had a small birthday party for me the night before and had let me sleep in a bit. I brewed some fresh coffee, watched the morning news, ran the dishwasher, and made a grocery list for later. Our new puppy, a birthday gift, was scratching at his crate to be let out. Suddenly, I could not breathe. My limbs turned purple and blue with cold, my head was red and hot, and my heart was pounding so hard I could see it move in my chest. Death felt certain, the terror was so great. My coffee mug dropped to the floor and I crawled on my hands and knees to the phone in the kitchen. It was a wall-mounted phone, so I had to shimmy up the wall and knock down the cord to grab the handset. It was all I could do to punch the numbers 9-1-1.
“This is the operator, what is your emergency?”
“Help. Heart attack. Send someone. Now,” I gasped into the phone. I could still hear my puppy scratching.
“What is your address, ma’am?” asked the female voice.
“I don’t … I can’t … Please. Just come.”
I began to scream. Sirens wailed and I remember seeing two paramedics over me, working on me. They strapped a blood pressure cuff on me and stuck heart monitors all over me. “Please don’t let me die. It’s my birthday today,” I wailed.
“Honey, you ain’t gonna die today, not on my watch,” said a kindly EMS worker as he helped me up and led me to the back of the truck. I believed him, but I wanted to know what was wrong with me.
They loaded me onto a stretcher and the waves of panic waxed and waned. Once at the hospital, I don’t recall much except a profusion of doctors and nurses hooking me up to intravenous fluids, and a loud beeping noise that was a heart monitor. On some level, I was convinced I was already dead. I thought of my family, of Tom, of the children I would never have.
Then Tom was there, coming through the curtain. He looked concerned but calm. A young doctor came in behind him and asked questions about what was going on in my life. I admitted that I had been in the middle of a terrible divorce, but that I did not feel as though that was enough to provoke a heart attack. I worked out; I was healthy. But I was also adopted and did not know my family history.
“Heart attack? You haven’t had a heart attack. You are the healthiest specimen I have seen today,” he said. He said that all of the tests had come back negative—EKG, blood count, respiration, etc., and that perhaps I was simply stressed, tired, or hungry. Perhaps I had had an adverse reaction to caffeine, an allergy attack. He gave me a bottle of pills and told me to follow up with my internist. I was dumbfounded. I had felt certain I was going to die, yet there was no clear diagnosis.
Over the next few days, certain that something more serious was wrong with me, I followed up with my internist and two cardiologists, but they all gave me a clean bill of health. I saw a therapist, too. But mostly, I stayed home, scared that the mystery illness would strike again. I still made it to the office and back, but there were no movies, no dinners out, no trips to the store. I became a hermit.
New Year’s Eve, there was a terrible ice storm and black ice coated the roads and the trees. Tom and I stayed in and made a special dinner of lobster, foie gras, and champagne. We were toasting the promise of a new year when