Ann Voskamp's brush with heart failure

Ann Voskamp writes at A Holy Experience,

Sometimes, you can feel like you’re suddenly falling off a cliff—- and you’re really just falling into the arms of God.

Sometimes you don’t even know that your falling has already begun.

I mean, who knew that the falling would begin like this:

I just took the elevator up to the operating floor, with my paperwork in hand for a straight-forward surgical procedure of a feminine nature. How was I to know that I’d been walking around for weeks, months, years, for who knows how long — with a hemoglobin in the 60s?

Which is half of the baseline 125 it should be.

And, unbeknownst to anyone, that was causing this systolic heart murmur — that was going to be what first started the nudge off the edge.

“So —what exactly is keeping you standing right now?” the OR nurse asks wide-eyed, stands in the doorway, touches my arm, like she can help keep me upright.

I shrug, laugh embarrassed. Maybe we’re all only standing because we’re standing under a reign of grace. Maybe we’re all only standing because grace is the actual air we breathe.

Maybe, somewhere along the way, my body had just slowly acclimated to lower hemoglobin levels, iron levels, oxygen levels. Acclimated to greater fatigue.

Maybe that’s what happened: When dysfunction moves slowly, it can masquerade as normalcy.

And this is what does happen in a thousand ways, every day: Life makes boiling frogs out of the inattentive.

...Suffering can be a friend who drives you where you didn’t know you needed to go.

...Life’s detours means God wants you to run right into His arms so He can reconstruct your heart.

...I came in with a little fever from a surgical infection?

30 minutes later the doctor’s back in my room — instructing a nurse to hook me up immediately to a heart monitor.

A heart monitor?

“We called to the city hospital — to speak with a cardiologist. Looks like you’re in heart failure. You have post-operative pneumonia because you’re in heart failure. Your heart can’t pump the fluids we’ve been giving you to fight whatever this infection is, and that’s why your lungs are filling up and your hacking like you’re dying. It’s because you’ve tipped into heart failure.”

...“We think — it’s actually years of the lack of iron — that’s tipped you into heart failure,” is what the doctor said. “Which is causing the post-operative pneumonia.”

Without iron in the veins — the heart fails.

Without the nails of Christ in the DNA — the heart fails.

And I’m lying in a hospital bed in heart failure and all I can think is: You only get so much time before here is over. There is only so much time.

There’s only so much time to forgive, to wipe slates clean, to make things right when you’ve gotten things wrongs.

There is only so much time to make love your life.

I lay awake all night coughing and choking wildly on the past. For five long nights, I look out a hospital window, sit on the edge of a hospital bed, screens blinking and tracing my failing heart and I cough up at stars:

How do you find a way to forgive yourself for all the ways you’ve failed and fallen? How do you find a way to forgive yourself for all the life not lived well because you’re still learning what it means to love well?

And I’ve blamed instead of owned, controlled instead of calmed, faked instead of forgiven, dismissed instead of peeling back everything and lavishing attention on souls just yearning to be seen.

When you’re in heart failure, you start to think of how your heart’s failed how many other hearts.

When you’re in heart failure, your broken heart just yearns for more of Christ’s.

...I was discharged from the hospital with a litany of pills and a warning from the doctor that the heart would need echocardiograms to track function and that the body would need 3 months of recovery from infection and post-operative pneumonia and heart failure.

...When the rain falls heavy on the roof overhead, on my first night back home, I wake and lie there listening. Home. We always, one way or another, get to make it back Home.

And there is always enough time to love — to forgive — to begin again. There is always enough forgiving grace.

And I lie there in bed, listening to the washing away of all the grime of what was, and growing what could be, even now, and the thrumming beat of it all, beats on with my broken heart.

And there is returning strength even in the middle of our dark night.

Read more and see her pictures here.