I had gotten to a place of being okay again. I was in therapy and finally able to put down the bottle in the evenings. I had fitness, antidepressants and even the worlds shittiest therapy cat on my side. I would still have anxiety attacks from time to time and anything related to my brother made me ugly cry, but I could give life a passing grade.
That’s when I got a call from my dad at work.
Dying of a broken heart, literally
My dad told me that he thought he was having a heart attack and wanted to let me know he loved me. It sounds sweet and maybe it was supposed to be, but he’s always been a bit dramatic so it came with a heavy side of death commentary I could have done without.
A co-worker drove him to the hospital and he got an emergency stent put in. Unfortunately, scans following the surgery showed blockages in most the arteries of his heart which would require quadruple bypass surgery as soon as possible.
To complicate matters, in addition to the heart disease, he had developed Type 2 Diabetes. The same tag-team-diseases that my paternal grandfather had ignored and died of complications of. I should mention that my grandfather was also an incredibly sedentary alcoholic so his premature death wasn’t exactly shocking.
My dad on the other hand never drank, maintained a healthy weight and was incredibly active for his age. Just a year prior to my brother dying, we would still go running or rollerblading together frequently. As far as I’m aware, not a lot of adults in their 30’s can say that about their elderly parents. So my dad’s diagnosis was shocking to me.
(Now that I can reflect properly on everything, I believe the actual downfall of my father was a broken heart. If not for the stress of losing my brother, his decline wouldn’t have happened so soon.)
Man-Babies
In case you aren’t aware, quadruple bypass surgery involves temporary death (your heart has to be stopped for the surgery) along with being cut WIDE open and having your arteries and skin moved around to connect back up properly after.
After hearing the gory detail of what the surgery would entail (most of which I spared you), my father threw a fucking fit. He declined the life saving surgery well aware it meant a much earlier death.
It wasn’t fun for him, and it wasn’t fun for anyone trying to convince him to live.
I’m not proud of what I said following his tantrum, but tough love and bullying is what I got growing up and I sure as shit wasn’t going to be passive in that moment.
I called him selfish. I called him a giant fucking baby. I called him a coward for not choosing to live for me and his only grandson. I’m sure I’m missing some things, but I was so fucking angry with him, my words turned to venom. That said, he eventually did get the surgery. So I win – suck it life.
The surgery was successful and he was one of the lucky few for his age with no complications and a fast as fuck recovery. Obviously, things are still touch and go with his health but he’s mostly back to himself.
A heart defect killed your brother, it might kill you, oh and don’t forget your child
Between my dads heart disease, my brothers autopsy report, and family history I was just learning about, the conclusion drawn from my dads medical team, was that all paternal family members needed to be tested ASAP. I, who erred on the side of caution (or the opposite of fuck shit up and worry about the aftermath later), had already shook my doctor down to get my heart tested after my brothers death.
Contrary to my concerns of having done irreparable damage to my health, the time spent intentionally hurting myself hadn’t butchered my heart. All tests came back that I still had my heart health.
That wasn’t the issue anymore though. The issue was that I hadn’t thought of this very heredity disease being passed onto my then five year old. While my son couldn’t be tested for any heart defects/coronary disease until he stopped growing in his twenties, my anxiety had already started rolling.
I had a sinking feeling that I could be passing on not only mental health issues, but also heart problems (we wouldn’t find this out until much later, but my fears over the health of my child were just beginning).
Fear the inevitable and highly unlikely
Anxiety is a near constant in my life, but I can be fearless when it comes to actual fucked up shit. I’ve seen (and felt) multiple forms of violence, extreme poverty, near death experiences and everything in between. The two biggest points of contention for my anxiety in recent years though:
- What happens when you die (nothing, probably); and
- The gut wrenching concerns of the future of my child in all forms.
I bring this up because that last point is life’s ongoing middle finger to me.
The tunnel vision I experienced when realizing the heart issues I had learned about, could affect more than me cannot be put into words (or they could, but it would just be paragraphs of me swearing belligerently). I may fear death but its coming like it or not, but my son was the one thing that propelled me forward following the death of my brother.
I can say confidently, I would have eat, prayed, loved into the wilderness (or possibly Thailand) and given up the house, marriage and regrettably dog, if not for my son. He became my purpose (admittedly too much). As stupid as practicing gratitude felt each evening before going to bed, my child’s health (cruelly ironic in upcoming chapters), was the one thing I could focus on.
Not to sound like an uncaring shitty daughter regarding my dad, but the scariest part about everything suddenly became that this shit could affect my otherwise healthy child.
Deciding to prioritize health
I wonder a lot about how different my life could be right now if my family wasn’t so adverse to doctors. With frequent visits to a family doctor, my brother and dad may have caught these issues earlier and swerved death and a vicious health decline…
Or not… they are and were stubborn as fuck so who is to say that additional information would have had any effect on how they lived their lives.
But having all this information deeply affected MY life. I didn’t want to just coast anymore. I wanted to live a long and healthy life free of disease and decline. The thought of losing mobility or leaving my son too soon became a driving force to change.
I also knew the first step to working on my health was losing the weight I had gained following the death of my brother. I have always had issues with food and binge eating and while they say you can’t outwork a bad diet, I had been an outlier to this rule for most my life.
After doing the math on how long it would take to get back to pre-dead brother weight after factoring in my issues with food, I realized how daunting a task this was. I didn’t even know how to start when I knew one episode of binging would knock down a whole weeks worth of diet progress. I had fallen too far.
That brought me to finding the mental health, greatest of all time remedy … By accident.
What started as wanting to lose some weight quickly ended in the realization that my fucked up relationship with food was doing more harm than I realized.
Until next week!
Sincerely,
Sammy
p.s.
How the fuck do these pictures relate? They don’t.
I originally wrote this entry with pen and paper while camping just me and my son. On that trip, while trying to savour every moment of our uninterrupted time together before I’m back to full time office work… His insulin pen broke mid-trip requiring a trip back to the city, and then we both got skin infections from the lake water. That is to say, I had other things on my mind.
Also, since I’m not SEO anything, pictures are only used to break up long walls of text and distract you from my subpar writing.
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