I've never actually done one of these homework assignments from @missy, @rambo, and @lyxzen, but seeing as I'm going back to school soon, now seems like a good time to start. I know I've told most of this story before, but it fits the assignment so well, I feel like I should tell it again.
About seven years ago, I thought I had finally gotten my life together. I was in the military, and was getting ready to start serving in a special operations unit. However, I had to have one final physical exam before I could deploy. The doctor decided she didn't like my EKG, but after ordering stress tests, echocardiography, and every other cardiac test she could find, she still couldn't give me a diagnosis. She did say that it looked like something she had just read about in an article recently or she wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong. So after all that, she sent me to a civilian specialist.
I sat down with this doctor and after he looked through my information, he said "You're a textbook case for Brugada Syndrome." There was a very long pause before he continued with "There's no cure for it." After another long pause, he said "You're going to die." Finally, he told me the only treatment for it is to have a defibrillator implanted under my skin, just below my left collarbone. He offered to do one more test, where a catheter would be inserted into my femoral artery and run up to my heart. They would use the catheter to inject drugs into my heart that would cause it to go into a lethal rhythm, to see if my heart would correct itself. On the day of the test, I told my doctor a few other symptoms I'd remembered having, and he decided to skip the test and go straight to surgery to implant the defibrillator.
I hadn't told my family about any of the ordeal because I knew my mom would ask a million questions I wouldn't be able to answer. I was planning to wait until I had something definite to tell her. So as I was being wheeled into surgery, I was on the phone with my mother, telling her "There's nothing to worry about, but I'm having emergency heart surgery in about two minutes." She did not appreciate my waiting to tell her about it, but at least it was something definite.
While I was recovering in the hospital, my fiancee was supposed to have told my chain of command about the situation. She gave them a brief description of what had happened and then spent the rest of the day with... her boyfriend. She had been cheating on me since we first started dating. Over the two years we'd been together, she'd had at least three other guys.
As if sitting in a hospital bed with no visitors all day wasn't bad enough, I started getting phone calls from my chain of command, telling me I needed to be in the office to explain myself within the hour. I was being charged with being UA, the Navy's version of AWOL. It escalated quickly, so that the matter was taken all the way up to the second in command. Suddenly, after it went up to him, the calls changed to "if you need anything at all, please let us know."
One month later, my fiancee finally admitted to cheating on me by handing me her journal as she left for work. She told me to read a certain section, and then walked out the door. I already knew about it because I'm not blind and she wasn't careful. When we talked about it later, she said she had to tell me then because my guard was down, and she was afraid to break up with me before because I was too strong and she didn't know how I'd respond. Anyone who knows me would laugh at that remark.
Throughout our relationship, I'd made huge sacrifices to help her get ahead. She was always my first priority. I even put up with her schizophrenic mother and her own blossoming schizophrenia. The problem was that I never loved her. I tried so hard to convince myself that I did, but it just never happened.
Nevertheless, breaking up one month after having heart surgery was very hard on me. That same night, I received my first defibrillation. I didn't know what to do. It was the beginning of one of the worst depressive episodes I'd ever had. For several months, I ate one small bowl of cereal a day. I lost about 40lbs.
It took about a year for the military to finally kick me out, but when they did, they gave me a good deal. Since then, I've just been trying to start over. It's never as easy as it should be, but I'm hoping going back to school will be the change I need.
In the meantime, all I can do is stay positive and never give up. After everything I went through, I decided to purge all the negativity from my life. Much easier said than done, but I'm still working on it. I assume it will be a lifelong struggle, but at this point, I'm okay with that. It's not an easy lesson to learn, but the valuable lessons never are.
