Listen to What Your Body is Telling You. . .

I’m normally pretty diligent about knowing what my body is telling me – I’m overly tired and need extra rest, my immune system is fighting a cold or flu, or the stress of every day life is manifesting itself in stiff muscles or aches and pains and requires me to slow down. But like most people, I’m guilty of ignoring those signals believing I’d get around to addressing them as soon as my schedule thinned out. Only sometimes, your body announces with a vengeance that “Enough is enough” and suddenly you find yourself in the midst of a serious health crisis, as I did this fall.

My school schedule was more intense than usual but I knew that at the outset of the semester, and thought I could handle working at my paralegal Internship every morning, grabbing a quick bite, and then zipping off the campus to attend classes four afternoons a week. That left evenings and weekends for homework, but I knew classmates with much tougher schedules so I wasn’t worried about over-extending myself.

In late September I began experiencing some gastrointestinal issues, but they certainly didn’t cause me alarm. Mentioning the problem to my regular physician she suggested eating yogurt targeted towards digestive issues to control the frequent flare-ups. Unfortunately, the symptoms continued to grow worse and by early November I consulted my primary care physician again and we settled on medication to stop the increasingly frequent symptoms. When that didn’t work I saw her the next week, and this time she requested extensive blood work.

That was November 12 and by then my body was sending out a red alert. I was extremely tired, weak, and couldn’t catch my breath. An avid exerciser, I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without panting profusely. When I returned from school that afternoon, my physician called with the following news – my blood work and electrolytes came back completely out of whack, for lack of a better description, and I needed to get to the nearest hospital.

Still thinking this was a gastrointestinal issue, the emergency room doctor began a CT scan. Because it was hard for me to breathe, he ordered an EKG and a few minutes later the small triage area was tightly packed with a dozen medical professionals. The grave expression on the ER doctor’s face didn’t prepare either my husband or me for his prognosis – I was experiencing a serious heart attack and being transported via ambulance to the closet heart center in downtown St. Paul. He explained I also had a clot; that the surgery was risky; and I could very possibly die.

In the end the surgery was successful, the clot was removed, a stent implanted, and I was on my way to recovering from the heart attack. After that, a specialist in gastrointestinal issues was called in and the second health crisis was finally being addressed. I was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis which had caused massive internal bleeding throwing off my hemoglobin, potassium levels, etc. Doctors also believed the heart attack was precipitated by my heart working extremely hard to keep me alive. After a hospital stay of nine days and countless tests, I was given the ok to go home.

Besides learning a most valuable lesson that my body was trying to tell me it was in crisis, this experience has re-energized my writing. My cardiac rehab classes provide an educational component and I’m already incorporating that information into articles that will appear on my web site’s blog, as well as various article directories. Research has shown that women’s heart attack symptoms are often different from men’s (as were mine) and that’s a message I want to disseminate to as broad an audience as possible. And I’ve learned a great deal regarding ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s Disease (doctor’s thought I could have either one), conditions I’ll also be exploring from the perspective of women’s health.

Even though the health issues I faced were at time a bit frightening, there are positives that came out of the experience. First, I’m on the road to making a full and complete recovery from both the heart attack and colitis. Second, this has given my non-fiction writing an entirely new focus of providing crucial information so that others don’t make the same mistake I did. And finally, there’s the reality of knowing not just how lucky I am, but what the important priorities are in life like a family who rushed from out-of-state to be with me, and friends who demonstrated in countless ways how much they care.  

The most crucial message I can relate is to listen to what your body is telling you. No one knows your body better than you, and when you know something isn’t right don’t wait until you’re facing a full-blown health crisis.

Kathryn Schleich

© 2009