Getting the results back from the MRI of my heart seemed to take forever. However, I was not worried of the outcome. I knew that it was probably a heart attack, even though the doctors at this point still all wanted to believe it wasn't. I can't even tell you how many times in that whole week, I heard one person after another shake their head and comment on how it looked like a heart attack, but I was just too young for them to believe it.
So, when the doctor and his team of students following him, finally came in to talk, they informed me that I had in fact had a heart attack. They found a congenital heart defect (meaning from birth) that had gone undetected all these years. The defect was that I had a myocardial bridge, which is layman's terms is a a place where the heart muscle grew over top one of the arteries, causing that particular artery and part of heart to be getting less blood flow. In turn, this kept the bottom part of my heart from developing to it's full potential. Usually the arteries and vessels run over top the heart muscle. The problem with it running under the heart muscle is that every time my heart beats, the vessel is squeezed shut, and blocks off blood flow. When they showed me what they found on the MRI, they showed me that the narrowing of the Left Anterior Descending Artery was in fact due to the heart muscle myocardial bridge. My heart attack was a mild one, compared to what it could have been.
After hearing what they had to say, they left us to believe it was because of the narrowing and the myocardial bridge, that my heart attack happened. You see, if your heart beats 40 - 50 beats a minute, then that arteries blood supply at the narrowing only gets shut off 40 - 50 times, but when I am active or exercising and my heart rate goes up to 100, then that means the blood flow in that area is getting blocked that many times a minute. Blood carries oxygen and so in that time, the blood / oxygen is being blocked from that part of my heart and that is what caused the heart attack.
Turns out I am a walking miracle. I had this my whole life and yet God carried me through and protected my heart. AMAZING and I couldn't be more grateful.
Okay, so all that said, they told me to make a follow-up appointment with my Heart Doctor and then discharged me from the hospital. The restrictions were as follows:
Six weeks of no driving, no lifting more than a milk jug, no vacuuming, no cleaning, no anything really. When you are trying to rest any muscle in the body, you have to give it a break from most activities and not use it a lot. When you are resting your heart, turns out you can't do much of ANYTHING. Oh, and they warned me not to get stressed. Um, yeah, I have two toddlers!!! :) All this said, I left that day feeling very happy to be in normal clothes and heading home. I of course had to milk this up a little to Micah. ;) I told him I couldn't open the car door, since I just had had a heart attack. I thought we could use a little humor, turns out he didn't find it so funny. ;)
The best part. . .. .I was going home to my babies. Praise the Lord.
