The room at 7am looked the same every day. Lines in, lines out. The Impella running its quiet mechanical rhythm in my chest. The monitor glowing green behind my head, numbers I had learned to read the way you learn to read a dashboard—not alarming anymore, just information. The ward coming to life outside the…
The nightmare woke me at 1:44 in the morning. I felt the kick first—a jolt to my left side, electrical charge coursing through my chest, my arm, my head. I came up out of sleep certain it had happened. Certain the ICD had fired. It hadn’t. The nurses pulled several minutes of EKG records to…
The Impella went in on October 3rd. It is a small device—a catheter-mounted pump, surgically implanted through the chest into the left ventricle—and what it does is deceptively simple: it pulls blood from the heart and pushes it into the aorta, taking over a portion of the work the ventricle can no longer do on…
Death came to my room more than once. The first time, I was at home, alone in the dark. I woke to a presence and looked toward the corner near the ceiling — and there it was. A dark figure, crouched, looking down at me with the patience of something that had nowhere else to…
