Getting To Know Me, Getting To Know All About Me. And. My Heart

Hey there!

With a new year comes new changes for us. Last year, there were a couple different subjects that I kept getting e-mails on. One, I’ve received several e-mails on wanting to know more about our family life and incorporating that/them here with the recipes. Two, I have received several different e-mails on my heart surgery. So, we are working on incorporating more family moments, along with something new called, I keeps It Real. I started “Keeping It Ever So Real” last year, but stopped. Until, I recently had a friend tell me, “She’d really like to see more of my real life and I keeps it real stories, because she really gets a kick out of it when I share, it makes her feel good that she’s not the only one that things happen too!”  LOL. Trust me, with five kids, you name it, it’s happened! You can count on it. And what one doesn’t think of the other will. My Crowded Kitchen is full of mistakes, grace and love.

 I will start this new year by sharing my heart surgery since it seems to keep coming up. Please know that this was an extremely sensitive time for my family and myself. Our faith played a very huge role in my story and it is what got us through this most difficult time.

I want to share something with all of you. I want you to get to know me and not just the woman who provides daily recipes. The only way for that to happen friends is for me to open up and share. This is a bit hard for me to do, to be so open and vulnerable. But, I believe that God allows us to go through trials and tribulations to help others and to change us as individuals so that we may grow. To use what we have experienced to help others when they are in need and in a same type of situation. That we may have empathy on another human being that we may not of had, had we not experienced.  In this post I’m just going to spill it. Oh no! Here we go, juicy juicy stuff coming your way… Are you ready? 9 years ago, I died on an operating room table. I was diagnosed with a fixable heart condition that ended up taking my life and I am living to tell about it. 

Let me go back to the beginning. I was living my life like every other day. I had just had my third child, Jay, he was a couple months old. When all of a sudden one day my heart started acting wacky, it was beating out of control. My mom, called the paramedics and I was given a drug to slow my heart rate, rushed to the hospital only to be asked if I was a drug user! “WHAT?! {In the Ducks voice from the Aflac commercial}I don’t do drugs.” I said. They ran tests anyway for drug use, which came back negative.  This was the first attack of many. These episodes continued for 2 years. We were on a first name basis with the paramedics, they were coming out to our home a couple times a week, taking me to the hospital. My attacks continued to get worse. I was under the care of a cardiologist who kept telling me, “I was fine, it’s just stress, you’re to young to have a heart issue. It’s just that your heart is beating fast due to stress.” he’d say.  I would of course argue and say “No, there is something really wrong.” I was young, but I knew that my heart wasn’t right. My cardiologist never once put me on a heart monitor to see what my heart was doing. He would just hand me a prescription for drugs to keep my heart beating normally and if that prescription didn’t work he would prescribe another. You see, what I had was tricky to catch, my heart would act up and go into rages, then as soon as it would start it would stop and act totally normal again. It was a hit and miss type thing, so when I would go for an EKG my heart was fine. We got a few readings from the paramedics and hospital only stating it was tachycardia, which they believed to be stress related. If only my cardiologist at the time would have sent me home with a heart monitor, but that’s water under the bridge now.

By the end of the two years, I was hopeless, I was weary, broken. I was at the feet of my Heavenly Father every minute of the day. I was mentally and physically frail. I would call my mother and cry every other day. I would ask her, “To please be sure to help Jeff, raise up our children.” I would cry and tell her, “How much I loved my husband and my kids and to make sure they knew how much I loved them every day of their life.” I really felt in my mind and heart like I was going to die. These heart episodes were taking there toll on me. My life as I knew it was over. I couldn’t drive, because I once had an attack coming on and quickly pulled over on the side of the road, because I was starting to faint. I had to have someone with me at all times, because of these attacks. I remember my babies standing over me crying, while I was laying on the floor, passing out do to my heart rate. This was when Jeff, called for in home help for someone to stay with us while he was at work and hired a maid. It got so bad that I had to shuffle when I walked, because any excitement or even walking normally would start one of these attacks. {I have to say something about this shuffling business… Jeff and I, were in Walmart and I was shuffling, I had a couple behind me that was in a hurry, I guess? They were so rude and made really mean comments, like I was taking a Sunday drive and some other stuff. I guess, because I wasn’t elderly and didn’t look like I had any physical aliments. In their mind I was just being slow. Even though these people were so terribly rude to me, it taught me a lesson, to always be patient with people, because you really never know what they are going through.} I lived this way for two years. I would cry out to God. I would beg Him to heal me. After two years of these episodes, God stepped in and came to my rescue.

I yet again, had another appointment with my cardiologist because of a doozer of an episode. I ended up being placed in ICU, because my heart wasn’t even beating. It was beating so fast it wasn’t pumping the blood, it was just quivering. This ended up being my last hospital visit before my surgery. I remember being 30 minutes early to my appointment, sitting in the car with Jeff. We prayed together. My prayer specifically was this… “Heavenly Father, please let me get another Dr. today. Please allow them to find out what’s wrong with my heart and properly diagnose me. Amen.” I shuffled into my appointment and was told, “Mrs. Tiffany, your Dr. was called away on an emergency, we can reschedule or you can see the head cardiologist.” I opted for the second choice, thank. you. very. much. I saw the head honcho, he took a look at my chart and said, “You know, you’ve been coming here for almost two years, I think we better send you to a specialist that deals with the electrical pathways of the heart.” Now, you can only imagine what I am thinking in my head at this point. Make a long story short, I was seen by the specialist, he said a few choice words about the care I had been under for the last two years and gave me a big hug, handed me some tissues and said, “Don’t you worry honey, we are going to get to the bottom of this!” He then sent me home with a heart monitor. Well, he was right, within the first day of being on the heart monitor we caught one attack, and within the first week, five. I was diagnosed with SVT, aka super ventricular tachycardia. {Whew! It took a week or two for me to learn how to pronounce this one.} I was scheduled for surgery the next week.

 What was supposed to be and hour in a half surgery ended up being almost six. Jeff, was pacing the hospital floors, little did he know they were trying to revive me. I had many pathways that were in need of an ablation instead of just one or two like the Dr. thought. When they were all finished they tested my heart, basically to see if it worked right and there were no more pathways that needed to be ablated. Whatever they did, my heart couldn’t take and it stopped. From what I was told, my Dr., the one who went to bat for me, jumped on top of me and was pounding my chest, that didn’t work so they pulled out the paddles and shocked my heart many times before I came back. When all this was going on at the hospital, my mom was awoken from a deep sleep, God told her to start praying for my life. She wrote a pray letter, praying for God to allow me to live. She was crying out to Him, she had no idea what was going on at the hospital, all she knew is that she was prompted to pray for my life. I have the letter to this day kept in a safe place. I just can’t share it, it’s to personal. I pull it out every other year, shed some tears and go on with my day. God is amazing! I am happy to report that I have been episode free for 9 years. God allowed me to go through this to change me for the better, to appreciate life, to learn patience and perseverance, and to never judge people for their inequities. I hope you get to know me a little better through this. From now on, I will share my family life and heart aches too! No pun intended on the heart.
 Blessings, Tiff