My heart stopped…

What doctors tell you. What they don’t. And what you actually remember.

How many times have you read that little phrase ‘my heart stopped’ in a book? Quite a few I’d guess. I certainly have. Perhaps the writer was trying to convey that someone had a sudden, strong feeling of shock, fear, anxiety, panic, worry, or surprise. We’ve all experienced the physical sensations that come along with that happening. Your stomach drops and your heart feels, for all the world, as if it stops.

But occasionally you’ll read those words and this time the person is literally telling you what happened. Their heart stopped beating. Maybe for a few seconds. Maybe longer.

My heart stopped during the afternoon of 30th December 2022. It went slower – registering just 32 beats per minute - and slower. And then it ground to a halt.

I knew nothing about it. I’d just been put under anesthetic for an operation - again. I had no idea. No sense of the adrenalin that must have surged in the operating theatre as they saw the flat line on the heart monitor instead of the normal bouncing blips.

Before you ask – no I have no memory of a near-death experience (NDE). I know I wrote about them in Was it all a dream? and they’re a source of fascination for me. But not because I had one – as far as I remember.

After the operation nobody told Kim what had happened. Not a single word. Nobody even told him how the operation went. And I only found out, seemingly by accident, a couple of days later. More about how that happened in a minute.

But there’s the thing about a disease like necrotizing fasciitis and its partners in crime – sepsis and septic shock. It’s hits fast. It hits hard. There’s no time to think. No time to discuss. It’s all hands to the proverbial pumps to just keep you alive and, assuming you survive, then to limit the damage.

Now I have to caveat what I’m about to say with the fact that this is my experience and mine alone. Other people, particularly in other countries, may have had a different experience. Though from the little I’ve heard from other patients I don’t think my experience was actually that unusual.

When an illness strikes this quickly there’s little opportunity for a doctor to sit you down, with your nearest and dearest, and explain what’s wrong with you and what they plan to do about it. In my case they weren’t even 100% sure what was trying to kill me until they opened me up in that first operation. There was no time to discuss a plan of action or any options.

Before that operation I had no choice but to agree that the doctors could do whatever they needed to keep me alive. Even if I had no real idea what that might entail. Nor was I in a state to truly understand what I was agreeing to… I couldn’t even compute that I might die.

The operation in question was on a Friday – my fourth operation in the space of six days. With this type of infection, they have to go in and do something called ‘debriding’ every few days. That means that they need to check to see if the bacteria are still chomping away on your flesh and if so then cut away the dead tissue.

There was nothing special about that operation compared to the earlier ones. Yet after it I was attached to 24/7 heart monitoring. Not the kind that was monitored just by the doctors and nurses on the ward, but the kind that is watched intently by a centralised cardiology team. They don’t take their eyes off it. If something happens they can react in an instant and send the medical team running to your room.

Nobody explained why I was being monitored this way and as I’d just been moved out of intensive care Kim hadn’t asked. We assumed it was routine.

Every now and again I remember that a nurse would come into my room and peer at me to see if I was OK. Sometimes they’d had a call from the centralised team that a lead had come lose that needed to be reattached to my skin.

Other times (as I found out when I went through my medical journal) they had been sent to check on me as my heart had decided to take a pause for a few seconds and then started to beat again. Doing that over and over again.

And sometimes my heart was doing a good impression of wobbling like a jelly – called atrial fibrillation - when they electrical signals in the heart go awry and your heart fails to beat as it should.

I had no idea that all this was going on within my chest.

On the Sunday afternoon – two days after the operation - yet another doctor came to visit. He was a rarity. He didn’t sweep into the room, bark his name and specialty, poke and prod my body, and rush back out of the door like so many others. Instead, he talked to me like a whole human being with a brain.

He took things slowly. He allowed time for my confusion to settle and for my brain to catch up. Thinking was still like trying to drag myself through knee-deep toffee. He repeated things when I asked without showing any irritation. Maybe because it was Sunday afternoon, he was less rushed than usual. He was kind, caring and got to know me a little.

He told me that I’d have a fifth operation in the next few days. But they had to wait a bit. He explained that they needed to know that my heart was OK for them to be able to operate. And he mentioned the word ‘asystole’ in relation to the previous operation.

I’m a physiologist by education, i.e. I studied how the body works at university, so that word triggered an old memory buried somewhere in my head. I couldn’t remember what it meant, but I knew immediately it was important. And I was thinking clearly enough to work out that something bad had happened to me in that last operation.

I was convinced for a couple of days that this doctor was from Cardiology - he talked about my heart so much. I managed to remember his first name, but as with so many doctors visits I’d missed his last name and his speciality. In fact, I’d find out later that he was another orthopaedic surgeon who had been part of my care since I arrived at that hospital.

I kept repeating the word over and over again in my head after he’d gone – asystole, asystole, asystole. I knew I needed to find out what it meant so that I could piece together what had happened that the doctors seemed concerned about.

It was only when my hands started to work again that I was able to look up ‘asystole’ on my phone and remind myself. It’s a type of cardiac arrest where your heart stops beating entirely. It means that the line you’d usually see going up and down on the heart monitor stopped moving in that operation. I flatlined. According to my medical journal the line went straight across the entire screen.

Like me you probably think they’d have gotten the paddles out to shock my heart back into action. But that’s not the case when your heart stops in this way. In this situation it’s all about administering specific drugs that improve the electrical conduction of nerve impulses in the heart muscles. And – believer or not - a quick prayer doesn’t go amiss.

They hadn’t even started the operation itself. But once they got my heart beating again they made the decision to keep going. I was already anesthetized, and it wasn’t a long procedure, so they decided to just get it done.

With any flesh-eating bacterial infection you’re treated by a multi-disciplinary team with no obvious leader. It’s hard to work out who should be telling you what. And even harder to work out which doctor, or even specialty, owns your care.

My brain was easily confused – it was only a couple of days since I’d been brought out of my drug-induced coma and moved out of intensive care. Even when someone told me something I had a hard time remembering it.

Doctors rarely visited when Kim was there – nobody made an effort to proactively tell him anything. Keeping track or even having any idea of what was going on or what to expect next was close to impossible. The little we gleaned was generally from cornering a nurse.

Much of what I now know happened to me has come from reading my medical journal. I’ve been through it multiple times, always spotting something I hadn’t seen or perhaps understood the implications of previously.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that we have electronic access to our medical records here in Denmark as standard. Without that I’d still be very much in the dark as to what actually happened, what was wrong with me, how my body reacted to the massive infection, and how I was treated.

I still don’t know how many things the medical team told me that I don’t remember. We can’t be absolutely sure what Kim was told as he was so traumatized by the entire episode that his memory is also incomplete.

But one thing I’ll never forget is that doctor on that Sunday afternoon. I’ll always appreciate his kindness, his empathy, and the way he helped me feel just a little bit more human again.

If you enjoyed this post please do click on the heart, add a comment, and/or share it on as that will help more people find Hold My Hand and my writing.

COMING ON 1^st MAY – my ‘book in parts’. In weekly posts I’ll be sharing my book Hold My Hand: A Journey Back to Life chapter by chapter. I’m so excited to finally share my story with a wider audience and to have the opportunity to get your thoughts and feedback.

Image caption: adding a picture of a heart monitor (ECG) screen with a flat green line across it seemed a little boring. Instead I thought I’d stick with a green theme and include another of my own photos, this time of a ‘metaphorically’ empty bench by the river near Wheathampstead, UK. I’m glad I’m still here to go and sit on that bench when we go over to the UK.