I am a fiftyish single mom to the love of my life and only son Joey who is now a college student. Working in Public Relations as a freelancer, I raised my son all by myself. He was nine when my husband completely abandoned us to pursue other personal affairs. My smoking got worse from half a pack to almost one and a half packs a day. Depression and anxiety got me to the point that I did not want to see other people, much less exercise.
My health was never the same again since then.
Rubber sticker on my chest
Several weeks before Christmas of 2009, I was hoping against hope that my husband would call my son and I to tell us he was ok, and that he would come back for us. But nada. Zilch. Zero. Not a word, not a whiff of anything from him.
I couldn’t take a Christmas that is lacking of a father and a husband.
Then it started. The intermittent pain in the stomach. Nights that I couldn’t sleep. The feeling of a rubberized sticker on my upper torso, from above my navel up to my shoulder blades.
My first instinct was to massage Eucalyptus oil on my tummy and on my chest as I did in the past to relieve me of muscle pain or the feeling of being bloated.
I tried sleeping in the fetal position and flat with my face and body down on the bed. During the first nights it worked, easing the pain I felt on my chest. But the chest pains got more and more intense as the days went on.
Until one morning, I asked Joey and my sister to bring me to the Hospital Emergency Room. The pain was so unnerving and continuous that it felt like I was always about to vomit but I never did.
At the ER, my precious +AB blood was extracted for the routine check. While an ECG machine was attached to my pressure points, I fell asleep. I woke up in an air-conditioned room with an IV bag attached to me.
After several days of loneliness, self-pity, incessant boredom and tasteless hospital food, I was given the doctor’s discharge order.
The doctor saw me just before I left the hospital. He said that I had a heart attack, a Myocardial Infarction. He added that I had to be very mindful of the quality of food that I ate so I was placed on a low-salt, low-fat diet. Smoking was also a no-no. Most importantly, I was told to avoid the things that stressed me. But how can one actually do that?
That heart attack made me feel sorry for myself. Being the stubborn person that I was, I still held on to my bad habits. The unhealthy diet, the overall lack of exercise, my smoking and above all else, the mental and emotional stress.
My depression got worse by the day until three years later, something out of the ordinary happened.
World spins with my eyes closed
As is my routine around 4:00 am, I went down to the bathroom to pee. With my eyes closed, I sat down on the toilet bowl and urinated. But together with urine, I was also defecating soft and watery feces. Still with eyes closed, I washed myself up. I felt the world spinning with my eyes closed as I climbed up the stairs to my bedroom. I called Joey midway and he helped me up.
In the bedroom, I was complaining of dizziness that wouldn’t go away even if my eyes were closed and in whatever position I was. My son who was in 5th grade then decided for us to go to the nearest hospital. While he hailed a cab, I struggled to grip on to anything I could get my hands on so I can get out the gate and board the taxi.
Inside the cab with Joey, still with my eyes closed, he asked me if I could raise my arms together. He said I can raise my left arm but my right arm was left on my lap. I cried.
While in the Emergency Room, my head was still spinning and I felt as though I was falling into a very deep sleep. The kind of sleep where the eyes are super heavy and wouldn’t open even if you tried desperately. I can only smell how sterile the hospital was. I recall the hurried movements of the people around me. I remember hearing the voices of nurses and probably resident doctors quietly saying “stroke.”
I remembered being wheeled into a room where the nursing aides were saying CT Scan.
In the middle of my “deep” slumber, my office mates came to see me. Despite my having dozed off for how long I don’t know, I was conscious and asked them to transfer me to a hospital that I was comfortable with. Not just because I was worried about my hospital expenses, but because I was comfortable in a particular public hospital where most of the doctors were my friends and the nurses were my students. In short, I trusted that public hospital and its medical practitioners to make me well.
My best friend coordinated my release from the present hospital, the ambulance that would transport me, and the acceptance to the hospital of my choice.
In transit, I had a lot of things running in my mind. I had meetings to attend. My newspaper needed final editing. I had to be up and about for Joey’s first day at school. How will I be like after the stroke? I had to get better because I needed to be alive for my son who is still in elementary school. What will happen to him should I die?
During that difficult time, I only had my fifth grader taking care of me in the hospital. Though my friends visited every now and then, it was Joey who spoke with my doctors, bought me my medicine in cases when the hospital ran out of stock, briefed the visitors of my condition, and handled our finances. He was only 11 years old then.
True enough, I had a stroke. My speech slurred. The right side of my mouth was drooping. I could not lift my right arm. And I couldn’t move my fingers. Things dropped when I tried to hold them with my right hand.
My son moved my fingers one by one and taught me to move them by myself. Back then, a small movement from my pinky was reason enough to celebrate and thank God. Imagine how thankful we were when I moved all my fingers all together!
Walking was another thing. I was limping. In order to walk, I had to drag my right leg and foot. I used a quad cane which helped me regain a little of my walking stride.
Before I was discharged from the hospital, my attending doctor advised me to go on a low-salt, low-fat and low-carb diet. That I should stop smoking altogether. That I must take my medicines religiously. That I must take fluids even if I am not thirsty. He said that my not having taken water even when I was not thirsty was a contributory factor to the stroke. I didn’t feel thirsty during that time because Typhoon Ondoy was ravaging Metro Manila. The weather was cold and damp, thirst was something that can easily be forgotten.
Though I was embarrassed by my limping and dragging movement, I went back to work a month after and resumed my daily grind. I was not normal because of the limp and slurred speech. So I applied to teach College so I could exert effort in speaking and practicing my speech.
That went on for years. Then I applied for my Person With Disability (PWD) card. Having the PWD card is not fun, nor is it a license to bully other people. It has its perks though. I get an automatic 20 percent discount on my medicines with prescription, the same discount in restaurants, hotels, and diagnostic clinics.
Eureka!
In August 2022 I felt the familiar rubberized sticker feeling on my chest. This was a week before my son, Joey, started his 3rd year Economics course in College.
A week before that though, I noticed that I was having fecal incontinence. I could not control my poop. When I have the urge to poop, it comes out even before the bathroom, soiling all my underpants.
And I felt a bloated stomach again. I once again felt chest pains that I tried to relieve with eucalyptus oil massages on the chest, paracetamol, and drinking a lot of water.
After my son left for his first day of face-to-face classes at school, I asked our house help if she could bring me to the same hospital that got me out ok during my stroke.
At the Emergency Room, I was triaged. I was also given my swab test on both my nostrils. An ECG machine was strapped to me. And a medical technologist took several vacutainers of my blood sample.
Then a doctor in full PPE uniform replete with a breathing apparatus and oxygen tank approached my ER bed. He said that I tested Covid-19 positive. Together with that I had a heart attack. He added that I was brought to the hospital in time.
Joey arrived from school as a medical aide wheeled me into an Isolation Room. Nobody could go inside the room nor could I go out. Joey could only look at my room from afar. The room had no windows.
After hours in the Isolation Room and two bottles of Intravenous dextrose attached to me, I was taken to the hospital’s Isolation ICU. The room was big and strikingly white with several hospital beds, oxygen tanks, defibrillators and heart blood pressure monitors.
The immaculate white expanse of the room, the smell of hospital disinfectant and the sound of continuous “beep, beep, beep” from the heart monitors sent shivers down my spine. It was creepy and scary at the same time as all the nurses were clad in protective uniforms because the Covid-19 Pandemic was still the order of the day.
During my first few days, I had an oxygen mask on. Periodically day after day they injected me with an anticoagulant on different areas of my tummy so that my blood unhinged and not cause a stroke (I looked like a leopard when I finally looked at that area as I easily get hematoma). My medications consisted of antibiotics for Covid-19, medication to regulate blood pressure, blood sugar and other medicines for whatever else they were correcting.
I must have had close to 80 needle pricks and blood extractions. One procedure that I really monitored was the Cardiac Panel Test to check the extent of the heart attack and my heart function.
Two weeks after the confinement, I had my 2-d Echo. It showed that my heart function was down to 60 percent from 77 percent back in 2019.
It was the saddest of all my hospital confinements.
I could only look at my son and my visitors from the glass window outside the ICU nurses’ window while talking with them on the mobile phone. The nurses received the food they brought for me. I was not allowed to stand up to go to the bathroom because they said I had a heart attack. Any unnecessary movement might strain my heart. So I had to pee and excrete feces on my adult diaper. It was gross.
The worst part was when the patient on the hospital bed beside me died of Covid! That was the Eureka moment for me! That I could die any time and never to see my son again.
I stayed at the ICU Isolation for 10 days. Again, the attending doctor said the usual things that I must obey. Low-salt, low-fat diet. Stop smoking. No stress.
This time despite my stubbornness, I obeyed him. I went on the prescribed diet (though I slipped back again ever so often) and left the job that caused my stress. Most importantly, I stopped smoking completely. I have been “nicotine sober” for the last six months. The best part? I don’t crave for cigarettes anymore.
And over and above all these experiences, two things were constant. The love of my son for his mom. And God’s love and mercy for a stubborn and hard headed person like me.
After all these years—two heart attacks, one stroke and one Covid infection, I learned firsthand that life is a precious gift. I can either treasure and nourish it or throw it in the trash bin. My choice.
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BusinessMirror would like to thank Helen for trusting us with her story about her health as well as her emotional struggles. This, according to Helen, is the first time that she is publicly sharing her story and she hopes that this will help inspire those who are in similar situations. As she states, she made a choice to break away from her bad habits and chose to live a healthier life.