There is a heart deep inside of your body. It beats. You likely take this for granted.
I know that we did. Jeff and I. We took his heart and its beating for granted. And this past Christmas morning we learned not to.
I feel too tired to go into complete detail. But I do want to share a few things. Jeff is 34. He has never smoked or drank or used any drugs, ever. He has always been thin, weighing about 150 pounds when the girls were born. But in the past 3 years, he had gained about 30 pounds, still a good weight for a tall man. But lately, he had started to look a little puffy. We talked about it, but didn't really make anything of it. Then around Halloween he developed a cough. It came and went and came and went. He grew more and more tired. But he pressed on and didn't do anything about it until a few days before Xmas when he learned that he had asthma. But by Xmas eve, we knew this wasn't right. This wasn't asthma. This was something else. He couldn't breathe at all and couldn't sleep and felt like he was drowning.
So on Xmas morning his mom took him to the ER and we didn't see him again for nearly a week. Two hospitals and a million tests later and now we know that he suffered from congestive heart failure. Heart failure is when your heart fails to pump properly, not when it fails completely. So, his heart was barely pumping and couldn't move the fluids around his body, so his lungs were filling with fluid.
He was actually drowning.
And that puffy look he was sporting was actually the extra fluids in his body. Some people get heart failure from a virus, but so far, Jeff's doctor's haven't found a virus and his family history points to this problem being genetic. Besides the heart failure, Jeff's left ventrical is severely enlarged and only pumping at 20%. If Jeff's weak heart is genetic, he likely didn't help himself with the past 3 years of little sleep, high sodium food and extreme periods of stress. Before we had the girls, we lived a fairly stress-free life, doing whatever we wanted, but surviving twins has literally turned into "surviving".
So now we wait. Jeff is on a pile of meds to regulate his heart and his fluids and he is on a low-sodium diet. It is recommended that Americans eat less than 3,000 mg of sodium a day, but most Americans, including Jeff and I eat about 7,000 to 8,000mg of sodium a day. A meal at California Tortilla that he used to eat all the time had nearly 5,000mg. We must all be poisioning ourselves with these sodium levels, I keep thinking. Jeff can only eat around 1,000mg of sodium a day now. This means that he mostly has to eat all fresh food and cut out things like cheese and anything prepackaged. I am nearly done eating all of the prepackaged foods in the house and then I will be joining him full time on the new food journey. This has been hard for us because I absolutely hate cooking. I always think that the food that you get at the end isn't worth the time it took to make. And now the idea that I will actually be making bread, salsa, whatever, from scratch is just stressful. I feel like I will never ever be interested in cooking, but it is now going to have to be part of my day. But I want him to live, so here we go.
We hope that Jeff sees some improvement in this heart, but if he doesn't, the next step is to get a defibulator installed and if that doesn't work, the final step is a transplant. I can't even let myself think about that possibility. So, I won't.
People keep asking me what they can do to help us. And our friends have been so wonderful. Beth coming to hang out with the girls, Felisa sending Peapod with groceries, Sara bringing grape juice late into the night, Kelly and Lisa cooking for us, Chris visiting in the hospital, Mary Ellen offering her driving services and being a good listener. Too many to name, really.
But what you really can do for me is this. Study the faces of the people that you love. Memorize them. Listen to them when they tell you they are tired. Take a nap yourself. Think about what you are eating. Accept that no one is invincible and take care.
