Black Feat

Two days prior to my 911 call for severe difficulty breathing, an event I wrote of earlier in this book, my symptoms worsened. Fighting back the tears, I thought this sudden acuity that seemed to last several days was due to my heart. Ut-oh! Anxiety setting in ---yet again. The intrusive, foreboding thoughts of my heart perhaps rejecting the surgery seemed to rock my world. That was when I drove myself to the nearest emergency room. After seven hours in the ER and one breathing treatment later, I was informed that my labs failed to find anything wrong. Discouraged, I asked to be discharged home. I did not trust the knee-jerk, reactionary dynamic at this facility because of a growing suspicion that was a little hard to figure out. What was concerning is all sorts of medical experimentation surrounding black people; all of which produced a different kind of anxiety. So the question became, “Am I as safe without a doctor as with a doctor?” The ER breathing treatment wound up being a band-aid of sorts. It really failed to adequately address underlying symptomatology. I felt even stronger about this in fact after being provided with a prescription for cough syrup with codeine, and discharged home. It occurred to me that medical staff was chasing something else, but I wasn’t sure what that ‘something else’ was. The anxiety about my health was real, undoubtedly. And I refused to apologize for an anxious state of mind that prompted me to shout fervently, “Don’t make me her…don’t make me her!” as I’m ‘mapped’ that way. Sweating profusely and gripped by anxiety, I worried more over my heart and much more over the defunct healthcare system I’d encountered in that ER. It seemed undignified to me; and I remained uncomfortable on every level. I remember thinking: among all these white coats that surround me, at least one doctor might attend to the narrative and deal with the issues of today.

Some weeks later, I learned from hospital lab reports that I'd leaked troponin, a biomarker that detects cardiac injury; it is a major health factor doctors botched communicating during the six-day hospital stay that resulted from my 911 call for help. I learned of the troponin leak after requesting and reading through a copy of my hospital report. Shouldn’t the truth of why the troponin leak happened have been discussed with me by a doctor? Why was it not? While in their care, I thought they wanted to kill me and settling down with this thought, my deduction was that the Lord has prepared a place for me in his time, not theirs---and I shouldn’t believe institutions that lead me to a bad place psychically. I must get myself home and pray for mercy upon me in a merciless world. The reader will note that two days after the ER visit mentioned herein where doctors found absolutely nothing medically wrong, I was back at the hospital via ambulance and unconscious. I regained consciousness and learned I’d contracted pneumonia. It was a baaaad-assed winter after all! After receiving this news I asked, “Did the asthma trigger the pneumonia or did the pneumonia trigger the asthma? Was emotional stress a factor? Did I have a heart attack? Why did this happen to me?

I had more questions than answers. And I simply thought at the time that doctors scrapple to deal with many challenges facing them in the ICU; that they’d provide me with some sensible impressions later.

Saturated with trauma, I needed to turn this trauma into strength. So, gospel-inspired, I prayed:

“God, please be in my now...”