I'm still not sleeping. Axel, at five months, is sleeping in slightly longer stretches, but not long enough that the people have stopped saying, "You look exhausted," to me. And now, this: my husband went in to the emergency room at 4 a.m on Saturday. He's fine, he's fine. That's what I kept telling myself, even before we found out that he truly was.
Sean woke up with pain in his chest and his right shoulder. Husbands should never wake up with chest pain. Wives shouldn't, either, or parents or significant others or children or grandparents. The world moves more smoothly when the words chest and pain are kept at a reasonable distance from one another. Sean spent about forty five minutes waiting it out in our bedroom, before driving himself about a mile to the hospital. We didn't want to expose Axel to anything that might have been floating around in the ER, so I stayed home with him until it seemed like an acceptable hour to call my mother and ask her to come over. I ran the mile to the hospital at 6:30 am, clutching my purse underneath my arm like a football, pausing to walk the last block so that Sean wouldn't think I'd been panicking.
They ran tests. A lot of tests. Sean is the opposite of a heart attack waiting to happen. He's a slender 5'10", works out like mad, hasn't eaten fast food in at least five years, has high good cholesterol and low bad cholesterol, and on and on. He was not supposed to wake up with chest pain at 33. Some of the tests were normal, but his blood work was not. Apparently some sort of enzyme (I still haven't figured out exactly what it was) becomes elevated whenever the heart's under duress - meaning when it's having an attack, or when it's under attack. A heart attack. Again, words that I would like to keep separated by full sentences, if not paragraphs. The enzyme kept going up. And up. And up. This was not the good sort of up as in interest accruing in your 401(k) but the bad sort of up as in this hot air balloon is going way too high and no one on board knows quite how to control the thing. Sean's chest pain went away later that morning (though it came back again early this morning). As for the ER - why are they so thrilling on television and so dull in person? Sitting in a chair next to someone wearing a hospital gown, trying to think of non-heart-attack-related topics of conversation would be a lot easier if there really were two nurses in the hallway yanking one another's hair over the on-call physician. All you doctors and nurses out there, you owe it to your patients to offer a little soap opera-style distraction.
*
I went to the grocery store to pick up a few things. I bought Sean flowers, but I put them in a vase at home. Bringing them to the hospital would mean he was staying at the hospital. A cheery yellow bunch on the table meant welcome back, everything is A-OK. I looked for a card, but there aren't any cards that say, "I'm sure everything is fine. I know you're fine. This is just a fluke. Oh, and it would really, really suck if you weren't fine." I guess I can see how that one might not be a best-seller, but weren't greeting cards created for hospital-related situations and funerals? Where are they when you really need them?
People do amazing things everyday. The energy Axel puts into the herculean task of learning to roll over to grab a rattle just out of his reach is amazing. We all did that. We all have gone from not being able to keep our fingernails from digging gouges in our cheeks to being able to put together compound sentences, balance a checkbook, and drive a car, even if some of us don't totally know how to drive a stick shift. Isn't that amazing? Aren't we all amazing? Given the capacity of our species, shouldn't I, then, be able to teach Axel how to ride a bike, if my husband weren't around to do it? It had only been one day. It's silly that I've even thought such things, but, awake at one am, with my husband trying to sleep at the hospital and me alone with our son, I couldn't seem to stop.
*
The doctors thought it was probably pericarditis, which can occur when a virus, like the one that Sean had earlier in the week, crosses over into the sack that surrounds the heart and tries to beat the crap out of it. I avoided checking into it on the medical websites; I've got hazy recollections of hearing about a young woman dying from after such a viral infection, and so I decided much rather just stay in the determinedly happy place of telling myself that, maybe people do die from this but it's about as rare as someone dying from Botox injections. It's just a virus. Like the flu! People fight off the flu all the time! People also die from the flu, and there've been wide-spread flu epidemics, so that may not be the best rationalization. On Saturday night, I wallowed in my medical ignorance and took everything as a positive sign. He had to have another test in the morning.
*
I managed my anxiety with cleaning products and baking. Our toilet bowls have never looked so sparkling. A plate of brownies sat next to the flowers, waiting for Sean to come back. I cleaned the cranny between the back of the faucet and the sink with a Q-tip. I walked around the house with my cell phone in one pocket and the house cordless phone in the other, like six shooters slung in a belt, on the ready for an emergency. If this continues, all my worry-fueled energy will turn me into a younger, more jittery Martha Stewart.
*
Axel has Sean's gray-blue eyes. He's just started being a baby flirt - grinning out at Sean from my arms, then turning to hide his head in my shoulder while he gnaws on my shirt. When we went to visit Sean on the cardiac floor, Sean swooped Axel up over his head, and Axel tried to grab the dark grey checkmarks on the fabric of the hospital gown, before bathing the gown in a warm puddle of spit-up. In the elevator, a sickly thin man in a wheelchair showed Axel his chocolate pudding cup and said, "Bet you can't wait till you get one of these!" Axel grinned and cooed. The nurses on the cardiac floor, on which Sean was the youngest patient and where babies are infrequent visitors, exclaimed over him, and one said, "Oh, babies. They just renew your faith in the world, don't they?"
*
Our best conversation at the hospital came after the nurse, going through her list of questions, asked Sean if anyone depended on him for care alone. "Not really," he answered. "He relies more on you." He nodded in my direction. "I mean, you're his food source."
Later, I said, "He thinks my boobs are his."
"Yeah. It's like you're just holding them for him for awhile. Like a wallet. Here, take care of this for me until I need it."
"I do that to you."
"Whenever we're on vacation, my pockets get filled up with the camera and your wallet."
"He'll eventually learn that they're mine."
*
The cardiac catheter showed that Sean's heart is pretty healthy. Upon seeing the shiny gray pictures of Sean's heart, Axel made his excited monkey in close proximity to a banana face, grabbing at the print-out and trying to pull it into his mouth. After spending hours flat on his back, Sean came home with us.
Many of those oft-repeated, simple statements are true. Sunsets are beautiful. Babies are the best things that happen to many of us. You don't know what it's like to be a parent until you've got a kid. Heart attack scares make you remember what's truly important to you. My man and our baby. Our family and friends. Everything is fine. We're fine. We have each other - and our shiny toilets and a pan now half-full of brownies.
