When I first learned I had congestive heart failure, my mind was a jumble. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t make sense of anything. To me, the words ‘heart failure’ sound pretty serious. You only have one heart. I’m a fan of Grey’s Anatomy, the television show, one of the very few I watch, and there was a guy on Grey’s who had just died of congestive heart failure. I had just seen an episode of Dr. Oz where a woman was looking for her biological mother and she had learned her mother had died a few years early from congestive heart failure.

So my only real experiences or understanding of congestive heart failure at the time they told me I had it was that people die from it. I knew nothing else.

So my mind was a jumble. A complete mess. I was so sick the day they told me that, that for the next six days, I pretty much only slept and barely ate. I could barely hold my head up. I was in bad shape. At the hospital, they had me on telemetry machines, and I had to take it with me when I’d go to the bathroom. It had leads hooked up to every part of my body–my chest, my abs, my sides, my legs, and my arms. If one of the leads came loose, the EMT guy would come in the room and hook me back up again.

One time, early on, I had to pee, and when I got up to go to the bathroom, my heart rate went through the roof (which was common back then–it’s not so common now, thankfully!) and shortly after, one of the leads fell off. The EMT monitoring me at the time came crashing into my room while I was peeing, worried that I’d dropped dead or something. In one respect, that was creepy that my actions were being monitored like that and in another respect it was comforting to know that if anything happened to me, someone would be there in a few seconds to try to save my life.

But then the longer I thought about that, the worse it was to think that… I was so sick I needed someone monitoring me to come running to me to save my life in a matter of seconds if something happened.

So yeah, my mind was a jumble.

Once I felt better, I was able to really start reading and I learned that congestive heart failure isn’t as scary as I first thought it was. Unlike most people, I didn’t get congestive heart failure because I was old, overweight, ate poorly, had bad cholesterol or blood sugars, etc. I’m not saying all people with congestive heart failure do this–after all, babies can have it from birth–but a good portion of those with congestive heart failure get it after years of living with other chronic conditions, poor diet, poor weight control, and such. For me, mine was caused by the pulmonary embolisms going through my heart. The worst could have been ‘sudden death’, something that is quite common with pulmonary embolisms. So in a way, congestive heart failure is better!

Unfortunately, it also means that I can’t really eat better and lose weight and ‘cure’ my congestive heart failure either. But the good news is, CHF is manageable. The management of it sort of suck, in that I have to limit fluids (and I love my ice water! I used to carry bottles of water with me everywhere!), and I have to limit it to 1 1/2 – 2 liters total per day. I have to restrict salt/sodium, because that causes the body to retain fluid. But if I eat well, stay healthy, exercise moderately, keep everything else in line and take my meds, I can live indefinitely with congestive heart failure with little to no symptoms.

Okay, I can manage that. It still sucks, but I can live with it, yanno?

So that’s my J word for the day–Jumble. A jumbled mind… then again, come to think of it, I think my mind has always been a jumble, even before congestive heart failure.

Just the nature of the Michy-beast.

Love and stuff,

Michy