Heart Failure: Living with Failure and Loving It

In October it will 2 years since I officially became a failure.  Just in case I wasn’t sure.  If I ever need a reminder I just need to check any medical document about me.

It’s weird to have this thing, failure, hanging over me.  Weird and liberating too.  The scars on my heart won’t just disappear on their own, barring a miracle.  I was reading up on heart failure in preparation for my cardiology appointment last Friday and one site had the NYHA heart failure classifications listed as “The Stages of Dying”. 

Nice.  Thanks for putting it that way.

But.  Wait a minute.  Isn’t that what we are all doing anyway?  Aren’t we all dying?  At 38 years old most people would not look at it that way; but between breast cancer and heart failure, the idea that if you try hard, work out, eat healthy, and are generally a “good” person, you will live to 90 seems sort of ridiculous. 

People, myself included, spend a lot of energy making sure that our life looks good from the outside.  But no matter how hard I try, no matter how many workouts or organic broccoli spears I eat I have completely failed at good health.  I feel like it isn’t my fault, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if it was my fault or not, does it? 

Becoming acquainted with the truth of my failure to be perfect has been painful.  Sometimes I feel like a burden on my family, especially financially.  Sometimes I feel like, why try to be a better, healthier person if it doesn’t really make a difference?  But truly God has just revealed the truth about myself, maybe a bit more clearly than is comfortable.

Sometimes when I walk slowly up the stairs carrying nothing I get out of breath.  And I get reminded that God breathes on our soul to bring us to life.  I get reminded that I am not in charge of whether or not I wake up in the morning.  I am not in charge, well, of basically anything important.  But I can decided to be loving to the people in my life.  And, am in charge of my attitude about my failure to be perfect.

It’s been about a year since I went off heart medication.  On two medications and with some IV iron treatments at the Cancer Center my heart function bounced back close to what it was before chemo.  It seemed,honestly, like a miracle.  But the medication dropped my blood pressure really low, too low, and I felt sick and dizzy every day for almost 9 months.  Not a fun way to live.

So, an experiment: would my heart function hold without medication?

Yeah.  Nope.  Not really.

An echocardiogram done the beginning of September showed a measure of my heart function (ejection fraction for those of you medically inclined) dropped back down to 50%.  Ejection fraction (EF) is this complicated thing that I won’t get into but essentially it’s like this: 100% means your heart squeezed out all the blood, literally wringing itself out.  This is bad.  0% means your heart isn’t beating at all.  This is bad.  A healthy person’s EF is a range of normal, 55%-75%, mostly looking at normal for you. 

My EF was a great 65% before chemo.  The lowest recorded drop was to 40-45%.  It makes the best sense, to me at least, to say my heart function dropped about 25%, this is bad, sometime during my pregnancy or birth of my son.  After medication it was back up to 61%!  Great!

Now I am back down to an EF of 50%, a drop of about 11% from when I was on medication, or I lost about 1/6 of my heart function.  My cardiologist swears that I shouldn’t be able to feel the effects, but I’m sorry, if I reduced your heart’s ability to oxygenate your body by 1/6 you’d feel it too.  Mostly it’s like getting out of breath or tired from stupid tasks that shouldn’t make you do so.

So basically I’m a failure at climbing stairs and bending over to pick up toys.  But that’s ok.  Because I suck at other things too.  Admitting I’m a failure, having this truth about myself be inescapable is a liberating God thing.  Why try to hide from God what is naked to His eyes?  Why try to pretend with you that I have it all put together when the truth is so different?

Josh and I decided with my cardiologist to not go back on medication unless my heart function drops more.  Maybe it will never drop more.  Maybe there will be new medications discovered.  But, what a crazy invitation from God: trust Him with my life and breath.  Trust Him instead of worrying and stressing about daily life.  Every heart beat belongs to Him.  Whether or not anyone knows anything of me but failure and my sins.  Love, belongs to Him.  Comes from Him.

And truly, the best invitation: that today could be my last day on Earth, my last chance to Love.  Am I going to waste it?

Living with failure, and loving it.