Dec 29, 2024
I always say the shingles saga as an immunocompromised sixteen-year-old was my near-death experience but then my mom will occasionally make musings of the time my heart stopped when I was 8 and I'm like oh yeah that happened
#supraventricular tachycardia#technically it wasn't the SVT that did it that was doing the oppsite and making my heart beat AT LEAST two hundred BPM#(machines at the time didn't go past two hundred BPM so we have no way of knowing how fast my heart rate actually was)#it was the adenosine they gave me to TREAT the SVT that caused my heart to stop lmfao whoops#it wasn't for very long but my mother can't tell me how long it was bc she said her heart was stopping in that moment too#it didn't take long for my heart rate to shoot back up to two hundred beats per minute tho#the uncomfy part of remembering all this is that I was conscious and cognizant of all of it as it happened#my heart stopped but my brain still was functioning and at no point during this crisis was I sedated#so I'm just lying in bed terrified as I watch my heartbeats on the monitor go from two hundred to the tens to single digits in the span of.#...fast#I blocked the memory out for a years until I read the account of a girl whose was awake when they used the heart shock paddles on her#and was violently thrust into my 8 year old body clutching the hospital bed watching the heart monitor rapidly ticked down#when the flashback was over I assumed I was over empathizing with the story but when I asked my mom she said that's exactly how it happened#we both recall shock paddles being pulled out at some point but they were never used#i don't remember if that was during the adenosine tho or at some other point during the emergency#as far as I know shock paddles aren't actually used to restart flatlined hearts like on tv#they may have been pulled out before or after to shock my heart out of tachycardia but again were never actually used#anyway fucking wow it's always interesting to remember this factoid of my silly life#near death experience#if you think it's weird my mom will bring it up out of the blue I'm ninety nine percent certain she has PTSD from this event#she's more traumatized than I am about it at any rate. like I said I have to be reminded it even happened#medical trauma
