My Trip to the Emergency Room

The next day, Friday, January 27, I did take 1 atenolol as prescribed in the AM. I did have some shortness of breath when walking up a hill to go from one building at work to another so I took 1 nitroglycerine tablet as recommended. These medications, in combination with others is was taking, may have precipitated my trip to the emergency room at Crawford Long Hospital. By noon I had difficulty standing without getting dizzy. I walked out of a lunch meeting to answer my cell phone and couldn't stand up from a chair to get back into the meeting. I managed to take the elevator to the lobby so that if I fainted I would be somewhere where others would see me. I opened my cell phone and punched in 911, contemplating the scene I was about to create in the main lobby of Northrop Grumman. One of my colleagues, Alexis, who in a previous career was a nurse, came into the lobby and asked me how I was doing. I told her the truth and she sat down and talked to me. She agreed it was time to activate 911 and had the lobby guard call for me. When the ambulance staff arrived, they checked me over and found my pulse was 35 and BP was 80/40. Not good for my body size. They put me on a gurney and took me to the ambulance. While on the way to the hospital (no sirens) I was getting major dizziness spells and slipping in and out of consciousness. I remember being wheeled into the ER, and then I remember waking up in what looked more like an operating room with about 5 or 6 people around me. I tried staying conscious and answering questions as best I could, but I remember coming back to consciousness a few times during that time.
I next remember what can be described as torture. I was shocked awake by what I discovered were external cardiac pacing pads. They were shocking my heart through my chest wall into contracting on a regular basis as they were wheeling me to an operating room where they were going to install an internal pacemaker. With the electrodes going off (what seemed like) every second or two, I felt myself bracing for the shock and muscles also tightening when the shock did come. It was such relief when the internal pacemaker was actually in place.
It turns out I had gone into complete heart block and my atria (upper chambers of the heart) were not working in conjunction with the ventricles (lower chambers of the heart). The pacemeaker did help regulate my heartbeat, but they had no idea why this had happened. I was actually discharged the next day from the hospital with a new pacemaker and newfound feelings of mortality.