POTS brought me to my knees and then became the greatest catalyst for change in my life. First I want to start my sharing a bit of my story, then we will get to the part where you change your life forever.
It is an odd sensation to have your heart beating at 165 times per minute when you are sitting still. You feel like you are running a marathon while not moving at all. You try to catch your breath but your heart rate does not slow down at all, no matter what you do. No matter how many deep breaths you take. As I looked out of the back of the ambulance as he strapped me onto the gurney with vision that was like looking through a tunnel. The edges were all dark and everything in the middle was so bright that it hurt my eyes. The sun was shining and everything was too bright, the colors oddly sharp. From the moss on the ground to the lichen hanging in the trees. Blinking against the sun, I could see my husband Magnus speaking to another EMS worker in the driveway.
Though I was not able to hear what she was saying to him over the pounding of my heart I saw a scowl of irritation on his face. I assumed it was from the stress of the last month and that yet another ambulance was sitting in our driveway about to take me to the hospital. Likely only to come back home with no more understanding of what was happening to me and another medication to try.
Fifteen minutes before
this, I was pretty sure I
was going to die.
The EMS in the back with continued taking my vitals and getting me hooked up to the blood pressure cuff and pulse oximeter while I focused on trying not to pass out. I breathed in my nose and out my mouth as slow as I could. Trying to focus on box breathing rather than panicking.
Fifteen minutes before this I was pretty sure I was going to die. I am not sure at what rate a person’s heart stops working but at that moment I figured that 190 beats per minute must have been close. It sure felt like it anyway. The woman walked our way and climbed into the back of the ambulance with us, shutting the doors behind her. This is the second ambulance ride I have taken in the last three weeks and I am pretty sure I now have the same driver that I had the first time around as well. She looks at me with a soft concern on her face and begins asking me the usual questions. After she gets my personal information filled out she asks me a question that at the time, made no sense at all. I asked her what she said because I assumed I had heard her wrong.
I said, do you feel safe at home?
“I said, do you feel safe at home?” She repeated to me. A look of concern on her face.
“What? Why would I not feel safe at home? I feel like I am having a heart attack if that is what you mean? So no, I guess in that case I don’t feel safe.”
She stared at me for a minute like she was waiting for me to go on, then continued to fill out her paperwork. It was not until later in the hospital when I was asked the same question that I would understand what she had actually meant, and it wasn’t the question I thought I was answering.
The male EMS asked what was going on and I gave them my most recent history. At this point I felt like a parrot because I had told so many doctors, nurses, and EMS what I had been experiencing. So I ran them through the last few months and how this had all ended up with me being in the back of an ambulance once again.
Hiking in the PNW – 2021
200′ below summit of Mt. St. Helens -2021
Yet at that moment what I thought was the beginning of my health issues was actually the beginning of the end of them. I was about to stand up for myself to doctors for the first time in my life. In doing so I would find answers to a question I had been asking myself and had begged them to help me with my whole life. I would pull together the pieces of my past and see how it was all connected. This was the beginning of a journey into mindfulness, self-accountability, and healing of trauma from the long gone past.
It took twenty years, eighteen incorrect diagnoses, and countless medications that I never needed to find out why I was falling apart. It took 35 doctors telling me I did not know my own body and mind, that I was wrong and they were right. Twenty years to stop playing the victim of my own life. Twenty years to stop letting doctors gaslight me. Twenty years to stop lying to myself. Twenty years to find the truth. My story is not a pretty one. It is full of pain, fear, sadness, and loss. Yet it ends in the most beautiful of places. With freedom and love and a sense of worth that I did not think was possible. It ends with friendship; on the summit of a volcano at 8,363 feet, with the clouds far below and tears of gratitude on my face. Yet even this ending is not an ending. It is only another beginning to a beautiful life that I never had the courage before to hope was possible.
Mt. Saint Helens Summit: 8,363 feet
July 2021
Freediving with Galapagos Sharks – Oahu, 2022
