Peace Train

In the course of this last week or so, I got medevaced. Long story short, I had a dizzy spell at work on the Thursday before last, and the medications I was given for high blood pressure caused my heartrate to slow down. The nurses were alarmed, as my blood pressure was also still high. Personally I felt perfectly normal, but it seems I'm no judge of that.

So last Saturday when I went to get my blood pressure checked, within minutes I was lying in the back room at the health centre here, hooked up to IV and monitors, and the nurse came in and stuck a defibrillator on me, she said "Just in case". And then she went off down the hall and I lay there and thought, well, what if this is it? And I found that I wasn't so concerned about the dying part but more about the possibility of pain. Was it going to hurt when they defibrillated me?

I know that this earthly life is short. I had hoped it wouldn't be quite so short.

I said a little prayer for myself, and it went something like this: "I don't usually ask for things for me, God, but I'm kinda needing your help here. Could you just keep my heart beating until the nurses can figure this out? Thanks."

I asked one of the nurses to call Miguel, and Miguel came to sit with me, and he didn't seem too concerned.

There was a song stuck in my head that day, too. Cat Stevens' "Peace Train," because Jann Arden did a cover of it on her album that I bought last week.

Now I've been smiling lately,

thinking about the good things to come

And I believe it could be,

something good has begun

And something in the back of my mind was very calm. All the while that the doctors and nurses were poking needles in me and sticking nitroglycerine patches on me and trying to figure out how to make my heart beat normally, I was just kind of watching. The ambulance came for me, they loaded me onto a stretcher with a sleeping bag, the kids had brought me the necessities – clean underwear, my purse, Frederick the frog I sleep with – in a pink backpack. Rachel was very concerned. I told her it would all be fine. Then they took me to the Lear Jet and off we went. It was a smooth ride and within minutes of landing in Yellowknife I was being unpacked in the Emergency room. They hooked me back up to the monitors and started making all the same noises the nurses at home had been making. They got out more nitroglycerine patches and handfuls of medication. I swallowed everything they gave me.

And I lay for a long time in the Emergency room, alone because you can't take a friend on the medevac, and a long time in a bed on the ward overnight, and then for another long time the next day waiting to be discharged. I sat cross-legged on the bed in the ward and looked out the window, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I spent a couple of hours just gazing at the trees with the snow on them and the sky with its clouds swirling around and thinking, "I'm so happy to be here to look at this beautiful day."

I know that I usually take my health and continued living for granted. I think it's kind of funny that I didn't feel anything wrong, other than a little bit of dizziness, I was assuming that all was well and I was continuing to work and carry on as normal. I have three beautiful children, and I take that for granted, too. Sometimes I feel as if I've always had them. We hadn't even been married for long, there was no questioning, like my brothers got, about why we weren't having kids. People had just gotten over exclaiming that we got married so young, and then we were having Kirsten.

I don't want to give the impression that I am overly humble. The reason I don't usually pray for myself is that I don't usually need anything. I'm healthy, happy, not in need – my prayers are for those I love and care for and meet in passing, those whose lives are in emergency, often criminal matters are overwhelming them, be it theirs or family members – someone on the phone this week said to me, "Welcome back. We were praying for you." And I found that strange.

My family's not real big on praying. My mother went through a spiritual emergency when her sister died, and decided that there could be no God. If she feels that she needs someone praying for, she tends to phone me and say, "Can you just pray for such-and-such, I know you're into that kind of thing." Sort of like two parents who are fighting, my mother and God tend to to do that "tell her," 'tell him' thing. I always gravely agree to pray.

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