I owe her my life

It's been three days since I had the pacemaker put in. Three days of pain in my shoulder, weird pulsing in my throat and discovering how good it feels to walk up and down the stairs without getting winded.

It's been six days since Amanda at the clinic fought to get me a special heart monitor that was monitored 24/7. I owe her my life. That is not an exaggeration. Let me explain…

For the past few months I've been dealing with heart issues. They thought it was SVT (supra ventricular tachycardia) so the cardiologist did an ablation to burn the over active nerves in my heart. That was done at the end of March 2013. It seemed to make my heart and life better. Until a month or so later when I could feel the pulsing again. It wasn't different for me. I had been feeling this weird skipping, pulsating for months if not years. I was put on a Holter monitor that I pushed the button on when I felt the pulsating.

The monitor just showed pre-beats. But that was wrong. It wasn't pre-beats. It was showing the after effects of my hear pausing. By the time I felt this pulsating, my heart was already coming out of the pause. The monitor wasn't catching the real problem.

I saw the cardiologist on the 8th of July and he thought my dizzy spells were just a passing thing. But told me to slap on a bp cuff when I felt them to see if they could notice a pattern. On the 15th of July I saw my Primary care doctor because I couldn't feel my own pulse and neither could the bp cuff. She called the cardiologist and demanded a follow up appointment on the 18th.

Seeing the cardiologist again so soon wasn't what he wanted because he couldn't figure out what was wrong. But he did what he called a shotgun approach and put me on a new med, ordered another heart monitor for 30 days and referred me to a neurologist. You see every time they did an EKG on me I was lying down and my heart rate and bp were normal. My heart could handle me laying down very well. It was when I was up or restless while sleeping that the problem occurred.

The day I saw the cardiologist, I was able to make an appointment to get my monitor the following Monday. I made a point of having the scheduler tell Amanda it was me again. God made my mouth speak up.

It was because of that point being made that God then put a gut instinct in to Amanda. He made her fight for the better, more expensive, monitor. And thank GOD she did. I had the monitor on for 24 hours and it picked up at least three 7.2 second pauses and a bunch of clusters of 3-6 second pauses. It's because of that monitor that I was told to get to the hospital. It was because of how bad those pauses are that I was kept in the hospital. It was because AMANDA fought for me that I didn't die. When I spoke with her on Thursday, before my procedure, we both cried. She told me how she felt pushed to get me that monitor all weekend, how she couldn't get over the nagging feeling that it had to be the better monitor. She knew in her heart that God needed her to save me from a very bad outcome.

I owe her my life. I will never be able to repay her for saving me. I will forever be grateful to her.