Worse things happen at sea...
Aug 08, 2016‘Do you wanna do steps again in the morning?’ Paul asked as we finished a great meal, somewhere in the Caribbean just off Haiti.
‘Sure .. seven thirty?’ I said
‘Sure .. seven thirty?’ I said
‘See you then.’
Paul and Kelly went off to their room and we went to ours. It was the first cruise Susan and I had been on, and the cruise ship (the biggest in the world apparently) was a spectacular ‘city on the ocean!’
The next morning I was up early, so I grabbed a Starbucks and watched the sun come up over the sea from the 17th floor. Absolutely beautiful. 6,000 people on the boat but almost no one about.
At 7:30am we started doing steps – Paul’s favourite method of exercise. It’s simple really, you go to the bottom of the staircase and walk up to the top. Then you go back down again and come back up again. And you keep doing this!
After 30 minutes of trying to keep up with Paul I had a strange tingling sensation in my left arm. ‘That’s funny’ I thought, ‘I had the same thing yesterday, but it is worse today. And it’s started in the right arm now too’.
I was badly out of breath five minutes later. ‘I think I need to rest for a minute’ I said.
We went into the sun deck on the 17th floor where I had watched the sun rise earlier, and I sat on the edge of a sun lounger.
The tingling in my arms had now spread up my whole left side and I was feeling some very strange sensations in my body. ‘I’ll just lay back and rest for a moment’ I muttered out loud.
As I laid back, my head started swimming uncontrollably and my stomach had pins and needles really, really badly. My legs were being pulled up involuntarily as I started to cramp all over. My hands were in spasm, they drew in, bent at the fingers, the writs and the elbows. It was suddenly like none of the tendons in my body were long enough and I was being coiled back in to the centre.
‘Are you ok?’ I faintly heard Paul say.
‘n .. n .. no .. NO’ I couldn’t form the words properly.
‘Shall I get someone?’
‘I need help!’
I drifted in and out of consciousness for the next minute or so while Paul went off to find a phone.
Then I heard the emergency siren on the boat sound and an announcement on the PA system. ‘Heart attack .. 17th floor .. all staff. Heart attack .. 17th floor .. all staff!’
‘I’m having a heart attack’ I thought to myself, that’s what this is. And for a millisecond, a I felt a stab of disappointment in my body, ‘All this time I thought I was healthy and I'm not’
When Paul came back, I was struggling to breathe ‘Oxygen .. oxygen ..’ I knew what I wanted to say but my speech wasn’t working.
Paul started doing mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Moments later, the deck was flooded with Doctors and nurses and boat personnel. With so many passengers on the boat at sea, the medical facilities were truly first class.
‘Tell me what you feel.’ a lady that I couldn’t see asked me.
As I tried to speak my speech was so badly slurred it was impossible for her to understand. I looked at my gnarled hands and fingers and all I could think was it’s not a heart attack, it’s a stroke. My Mum had had a stroke a few years before and I was all too familiar with the symptoms.
‘We need to get him down to ICU now’ a male voice said.
They put me on a snap board thing, lifted me onto a trolley and started wheeling me down to the basement.
As we wheeled through the boat from one lift to the next, I thought to myself, ‘Well if this is it, this is it!’ and I closed my eyes and tried to surrender everything to God. I was sort of disappointed that there weren’t any kinds of spiritual visions or bright lights .. 'maybe that's a good sign' I thought!
Susan and Kelly had been having breakfast when they heard the announcement of someone having a heart attack. Paul managed to get hold of Kelly on her phone and told her to bring Susan to the ICU immediately.
‘Roddy’s not well, we need to go to ICU now’ Kelly told Susan.
‘What is it, what’s happened?’ Susan asked.
‘We need to go now’ Kelly said again.
When they got to my room in the Intensive Care Unit, I was lying in a hospital bed in a blue gown, on oxygen with electrodes connected all over my body. I think the sight freaked them out just a little bit, and Susan began to cry.
‘Are you ok?’ Paul asked me, watching me wriggle in the bed.
‘I feel a bit sick’ I said.
Paul looked around and pulled a cord next to the bed. Alarms started sounding all over the ICU department. Dr Ramirez dived into the room. ‘What is it?’ He asked frantically.
‘He feels a bit sick’ Paul said.
‘We’re in the next room, just poke your head around, no need to pull the emergency cord!’ he scolded, and went out!
About 30 minutes later, Dr Ramirez came back in with some test results. ‘You haven’t had a heart attack’ he said ‘there are no enzymes in your blood for that. We can’t rule out a neurological disorder somewhere though, so you need to have a brain scan. I’m afraid we can’t do it on the ship, so you have to go the hospital ashore.’
‘Where are we? I asked.
‘Jamaica’ he said.
'Jamaica' I muttered, 'Not really the way I imagined my first visit!'
To be continued tomorrow .. Until next time ..
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