If You Had a Short Time Left to Live

What would you do if you only had a short time left to live? This actually happened to me, except I survived.  What I thought I would do and what I did, in fact, do were not the same things.

My extended brush with death came about when I had congestive heart failure, brought on by treatment for thyroid cancer. Since I was not really a candidate for congestive heart failure, and hadn’t even heard of it, by the time I sought medical treatment I was, as the doctor said, gravely ill. Hearts have an ejection fraction, which is a measurement of how well they pump out blood. A normal ejection fraction is between 55 and 70. When it drops down to 40 you get diagnosed and start medication. At my first doctor visit my ejection fraction was 7. It rarely happens that someone with a heart as sick as mine was survives, but I did.

There was no sudden healing. I endured a year of simply not dying that day. I expected it at any moment. Everything I did felt like the last time. There was one day when I came awfully close to death. I was in the car with my family and my heart went into an odd rhythm unlike common pvc palpitations. I felt the blood drain out of my head and started to quietly black out. Then it started beating normally again. My heart had fibrillated. It was terrifying.

This is what I would have thought I would do when faced with my own death, and what I actually did.

1     Upon hearing a diagnosis of probable imminent death I thought I would rapidly cycle through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Instead I skipped right past denial and didn’t have the energy to be angry. I followed all the doctor’s instructions to the letter, which I suppose could be construed as bargaining. Then for a while I was plucky: I’m going to beat this! Depression came later and was massive. It has been seven years and I still haven’t completely reached the acceptance point. After I survived I wallowed around in depression for years, then circled back to anger. Acceptance is on my to-do list – not acceptance that I was going to die, since I didn’t, but acceptance that such a thing could ever have happened to me. I protest! I’m against it! As for denial, which I had skipped in the first place, my husband has that one covered.

2    Emotional reactions aside, it seems like the first thing you would do is get your affairs in order. The reality is that if you’re so sick you’re about to die you just don’t have it in you to worry about consolidating bank accounts, updating wills, and so forth. The life lesson here is to keep your affairs in order all the time. Also remember that eventually someone else is going to go through all your drawers.

3    Wouldn’t your imminent death be a great time to say all those things to people you’d been needing to say? Some things, yes. I think I told my family a billion times how much I love them, which wasn’t really news. But when my heart was barely beating the last thing I needed to be doing was to call up an old boyfriend or someone else from my past and hash things out or say what they’d meant to me. If you’re too chicken to say something now you’re not going to be less chicken when you’re at death’s door. Let’s be realistic.

4    About that bucket list – do it now. Sick people don’t tick off items on the list. After I was doing better I did start work on the novel I always meant to write, and I’m still working on it.

5   They say your life flashes before your eyes, and I have to agree with that, except for the flashing part. Since I seemed to be dying a slow death my life spun out for me slowly. Many memories came back to me of who I was at all the stages of my life.

What else?

I condensed my life down to just my family. I decided I wasn’t going to spend my remaining time yelling at my kids about homework and videogames, but to make sure they knew how much I loved them. Nor was I going to spend it worrying about my diet, other than the low-sodium diet the doctor had prescribed. Cleaning house? I mostly couldn’t, so we hired cleaners and said that was clean enough.

I reevaluated my religion, throwing out much of the religion and keeping Jesus. I saw through a lot of big talkers. I saw who really cared about me. I saw plain as day that God had His hand on me. I stopped letting people waste my time with immature lessons on spirituality.

I played a lot of World of Warcraft. If you are inclined to scoff, watch this TED talk, which talks about how playing games increases your resilience and decreases depression: http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_the_game_that_can_give_you_10_extra_years_of_life.html I hadn’t seen the TED talk when I started, but my kids were playing WoW and I was doing lots of things with them. I found that the social aspect, the reward system, etc., of games were keeping me feeling strong and positive.

What do you think you would do if you knew you had a short time left to live?