On Tuesday morning, I saved my husband’s life.
Zero exaggeration. His heart had stopped. Sudden cardiac arrest.
I did CPR on him while waiting for the EMT’s, who had to shock him twice to get his heart going again — so no possible mistake or misinterpretation about it.
A day later I interrogated the electrophysiologist, and he said he read the strips from the EMT’s himself, and he said my husband was definitely in ventricular fibrillation, which means his heart had completely stopped. (This will be important later. When talking to the doctor, I had to make sure there was actual hard, inarguable data.)
I have since learned that in sudden cardiac arrest, brain damage occurs after 5-6 minutes without blood flowing, and death occurs in 6-8 minutes.
The ER nurse confirmed that the CPR I did kept him “perfused” — meaning I was moving the blood around adequately to keep his brain oxygenated and free from damage.
The survival rate for SCA outside a hospital setting is less than 10% — and that’s just survival, let alone surviving “neurologically intact” (my new favorite phrase in the whole world).
My husband survived, neurologically intact, and beat those dismal odds, thanks to me.
I not only saved him from dying, I also saved the part of him that is him.
The EMT’s said it; our GP said it; the ER nurse said it, along with countless other hospital staff. Over and over the EMT’s said, “You did everything right” and explained to me that I was the first two links in the Chain of Survival. The ER nurse said, “You did exactly what we hope everyone would do.” (Here we see me amassing evidence from outside authorities to back up my “claim”.)
I am writing this because my reactions to being told, “You saved his life!” again and again over the past few days have been most illuminating.
At first, it was almost annoying. My initial internal response was, “Well, what the hell else would I do?”
Then it turned into saying self-deprecating things, diminishing what I had done. I said things like,
- “Well, I really didn’t do anything, I just followed instructions.”
- “We were just super lucky.”
- “There was a job to do and I just did it.”
- “Honestly it does not feel like I did much of anything other than follow directions.”
- “The dispatcher walked me through everything … I really just did what the dispatcher told me to do.”
The one and only thing I was genuinely proud of in the immediate aftermath was that I remembered to run and unlock the front door before the 911 dispatcher told me to. When she told me to, I said “I already did!” and I felt that was the only part I could really claim to have done myself.
The next day I was of course doing a lot of googling and rapid self-education on cardiac arrest, and I sent this message to a friend:
All right, maybe I did save him. I wasn’t sure that the CPR was enough to keep his brain going. Heart, yes. Brain, I wasn’t too sure about that.
(Here I found another outside authority to quote — and even then I could only say “maybe”.)
A couple of days after the event, I posted about it in a closed group of online friends. The responses were, of course, overwhelmingly positive and supportive, because they are decent people and they genuinely care about me. These are some of the things they said to me:
“holy shit, way to go, YOU! Never been in a situation like that but can only hope I’m as capable as you were”
“You FREAKING rock. But we knew that.”
“takes great presence of mind to handle this situation and you are incredible!!”
“I am so proud of you!!”
“you saved him (YOU SAVED HIS ACTUAL LIFE!!! … accept the accolades, you badass life-saving muthafukka!!!”
“OMG! You’re amazing”
“Damn, that is some scary shit! You were a real champion”
“You’re a strong woman. I think you need a cape.”
“You did so well to “keep the heid” as they say in Glasgow and not lose your shit completely in a panic. Well done you!”
“not many people have an amazing and focused wife”
“I’m going to goddam pieces here for you. I AM PROUD OF YOU.”
“Great job! You are a freakin’ HEROINE!”
“Holy fuckballs! But seriously yay for you keeping your head and the blood flowing.”
“I guess now you know how you react in a crisis. Can I be on your team when the zombie apocalypse hits?”
But the most important comment was made by a friend in The Netherlands:
Nope. You don’t get to downplay this. You played a major part in saving your husband’s life.
I expect that certain people who might read this have by now assumed that I am writing this to make a big deal over myself and brag to them. Right around “My husband survived, neurologically intact, thanks to me”, I figure.
That assumption would be incorrect on a couple of levels. First of all, because there is an underlying assumption that to be justly proud of this accomplishment is a bad thing for me to do. If one of them had done it, I am sure they would be getting (well-deserved) praise from siblings. I would not. Which is pure bullshit.
In fact I suspect any such readers instantly made various excuses in their heads about what I did, to minimize it, to downplay it, to make it so I didn’t really do anything awesome, which is something I’m not allowed to do.
This is why I had the need for the hard data and the outside authority. To push back against the negativity, the scapegoating, the criticism and minimization and sabotage that I have historically gotten from certain people for my accomplishments.
One of the rationales for minimizing what I did will probably be “so what, Susan’s done this plenty of times.” Well yeah, she’s a fucking nurse and gets trained and paid to do it.
And right there I am defending against a critical observation that I can reasonably predict will be made, and the one which can’t be refuted with the hard data and the outside authority. Here it’s at least admitted what I’ve done, but it’s minimized because someone else has also done it.
And you can fuck right off with that. The EMT’s and the ER nurse have done it a thousand times too, but they all congratulated me anyway. Because they don’t have a pathological jealous need to minimize what I did. They are simply happy that my husband is alive and that I did the right things and saved him. If you can’t do that too, there is something fucking wrong with you.
And this is also the source of the annoyance at the beginning. Because I already knew EXACTLY what I’d done. It was fairly obvious I’d saved his life.
But having been trained really thoroughly by a bunch of jealous people, my reaction to having people say it out loud to me was not a feeling of pride or relief; it was annoyance that it now became “necessary” for me to start downplaying it, even though I didn’t want to. More emotional work for me.
After a couple of days I figured out that I was saying the self-deprecating things as a defense mechanism — to say them BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE COULD DO SO, because it hurts a little less coming from my own mouth than from others.
Who I was expecting to “say” those things? I could put names to them. Names I have known my whole life. Sister, Brother #1, Brother #2, Brother #4. These negative, self-diminishing things are what I would expect to hear from them, and the positive, affirming things my friends said are things that I cannot actually imagine my siblings saying to me.
It’s a toss-up on those first two, which sibling would be the first to claim it was all God’s doing, which is just another way of taking credit away from me — although Brother #1 is the one who would go further and try to take some credit by saying that it was because THEY STILL PRAY FOR US, because they are such good people as to pray even for us, even though we don’t deserve it.
There is probably some form of “all those online people saying nice things about you don’t really know you” being thought, as well.
I’m not making these derogatory things up. Every single one of them is rooted in some factual past incident; every one of them has been said and/or done to me by someone in that group, many of them at the worst time of my life.
Secondly, I am writing this for the same reasons as I always write on this blog: in order to help me understand the past, process things that have happened, and work through realizations I’ve made. This one is a biggie, and I would be hard-pressed NOT to write about it. And I decided my need to write about it is more important than my biggest reason not to write about it.
Which is of course the “no contact” decision. It’s been written here before that under stress, old patterns take over.
If he had died, the decision would have already been made. We already have a pact that if either one of us dies, the other is NOT to notify any of my relations.
But this wasn’t death, although it was the next thing to it. And so, over the past four days, there have been moments when I thought about letting some of my estranged relations know about this. Old habits die hard, and at a time of severe crisis, the idea of being able to turn to the people you’ve know the longest, and having them love and support you, is still a very attractive fantasy.
And I thought through it some more, and decided against it, because it IS a fantasy. If they read it here on the blog, well, as I said it’s more important to me to write about it for myself, than to let them know about it. I don’t care what they think, I don’t care what they do, nor what they know or assume or conjecture.
Because interestingly, after realizing what voices I was “hearing” — and subsequently telling them to all fuck off, both mentally and through writing this piece — the voice that I can finally hear is my Dad’s.
Dad’s “voice” is now not silenced by my own self-deprecating words, or those I can imagine coming from others — it is now amplified, by what my real friends, and even the strangers, have said. I know what I would hear from him today, if I could tell him what happened, because it is echoed by the normal healthy people around me now.
And I see that his is the voice that the others have always been trying to silence with the things they’ve said (and not said) — because his is the voice that has always been hugely proud of me.
ETA (2 days later) — To clarify: I’m certain if my siblings read this, or their kids, or their friends, or whoever, they will insist that “they’re not like that!”
Maybe they aren’t. It’s been several years since I’ve interacted with them, after all. And maybe they aren’t like that — to other people.
“…even everyone’s favorite “nice guy” (or girl) can be an abuser. Sometimes abusers are really nice and funny (until they’re not)... Sometimes they’re really sensitive, caring people who lose control once in a while… Sticking with the pervasive idea that abusers are monsters makes it easier to overlook… otherwise regular folks… People are complex and complicated, but they’re rarely all bad, all the time…
They will defend themselves, and others will defend them, by saying that what I have written is wrong.
Nope. It is not wrong, and no one can say that it is wrong.
Because — and this is one of the crucial points that has always been missed — this isn’t only about THEM. It is about HOW THEY TREATED ME. It is about my experiences at their hands. The people who I imagine, who obviously still have hold on some real estate in my head, are based on my history, my experiences, my memories of how they acted towards me.
I have positive memories too, but not as many — and they are pretty much overwhelmed by the shitty things they did to me at the worst of times (and echoed by somewhat less shitty things, done over decades).
“… there can be a lot of happy times. A lot of calm times… A lot of fun…
“If someone you know says, “But I loved them and I miss them,” the correct answer is not, “Are you an idiot?” It’s something more like, “Yeah, we can love and miss people who aren’t good for us and who can’t be in our lives. It sucks, but it gets better with time.”