Busy girl

I don't know whether I feel like a new woman, or my good old self, or if it's just the sun coming back after the darkness of winter, but either way, life is good. After a couple more doctor visits in January my heart has been declared healthy, the new arteries are fully compensating for the one that was lost. The irregular heart beat was found to be benign, and has been decreasing in frequency. Best of all, I'm off the strongest of the medications. I feel like the fog has lifted.

Even though I've been ignoring the blog, I've been a busy girl. I knit a bunch of stuff, fingerless mitts and socks, for my kidlets, which went off to their new owners without photographic documentation. I've been embroidering like a mad woman, and I'm taking a couple of online classes about art journaling. I've even been doing a little bit of applique, which I'll show you soon.

It's been a lot of fun to be "off task" for a while. I've had time to reacquaint myself with hand embroidery. The local embroidery guild has made a crazy quilt to raffle as a fund raiser. It was such a joy to work on that I almost went into mourning when I finished my block and had to turn it in.

We were each given a base block, already pieced, to embellish. Since this is way outside my normal comfort zone it was both scary and exciting to make the decisions for each space. I've been pouring over books on crazy quilting for ideas.

The hardest part for me was knowing when I had done enough. I think my normal style is a little spare. I like space. But spare is not commonly associated with crazy. Overall, I am rather pleased with the outcome. The block holds its own with the rest of the blocks. I'll be sure to post a picture of the full quilt when I get one. It's stunning.

I had originally planned to do a long post with little bits of everything I've been up to, but I've reconsidered. It's time to jump start the blog, get back into the swing of things. I've even started booking workshops again! Just wait until you see all of the neat stuff I have to show you!

My new normal

Where do I start? That's always the problem, isn't it? If I knew where to begin I'd have begun long ago. It's true of so many of the things we want to do. Big deals rarely have obvious starting points. Sometimes there are so many "but firsts" to get in line before actually beginning that finding the beginning is almost impossible.

On the day in early December that I had planned to be attending the annual Bernina Ambassador Reunion I instead found myself being admitted to the hospital. The Reunion is seriously fun. It's two days of learning all sorts of new techniques and features of the newest Bernina sewing machines. It's also two days of networking with other professionals in the quilting industry. It's hard to measure which aspect is more pleasing.

I had been working like a fiend to finish the quilting on Christmas Yet to Come for the Reunion's show and tell. If you don't mind my saying so, it's a spectacular quilt and who doesn't love drawing gasps of delight from an audience? And this audience contains some of the brightest stars of the industry (how I got in I'll never know, but I'm forever grateful for it), we all want to show ourselves at our best.

Meanwhile I've had this thing going on in my chest. You may remember that I had a heart attack last March, the 7th to be exact. (The symptoms started right after the final episode of Downton Abbey aired, feel free to draw your own conclusions.) They put in a stent to open a blocked artery, congratulated me on getting to the hospital so early that no damage was done to the heart muscle and sent me off to have a nice life. Which I happily did, until September.

It started with an occasional, weird thumping heart beat, something I've never experienced before. Nothing dramatic, really, just a "hmm, that's different" sort of thing. With a shrug of my shoulders I remembered that I had a regular check up with the cardiologist coming in a few weeks and it's probably nothing anyway.

The thumping continued, becoming more frequent, and soon came to include some mild versions of the symptoms I felt at the time of the heart attack. So, onto the treadmill for a stress test. Yeah, there's something wrong, but nothing remarkable. New meds. Reaction to new meds. Other new meds.

The morning of the Reunion I awoke with jaw pain. I as I lay in bed I came to terms with missing the Reunion, the two hundred dollar non-refundable hotel room, had a small pity party complete with ugly crying, and then called the cardiologist. By the end of the day I was in the hospital and scheduled for another catheterization. A blood test showed that I wasn't actually having another heart attack, but the cath was the next right step to figure out what was going on with me. The head cardiac care nurse came in to explain the procedure and, in a very round about way, that my tests didn't show any serious problems and this was all probably in my head. I told her I've been in my head and it's not there. I've done anxiety, and this isn't it.

This is what's called burying the lead. I've finally, all these paragraphs later come to the point of the story. There was something wrong with my heart, something very wrong indeed. The stent had closed with scar tissue. I once again had a complete blockage of my right coronary artery, exactly what lead to the heart attack in March.

If you'll forgive my language, this was a serious WTF moment for the doc. My own cardiologist wasn't available to do the cath, so one of his partners did it. They were so surprised by the finding that they called my doc to the operating room, saying that he had to see this!

By all rights, I should have had another heart attack, but it seems that during all those weeks of weird thumping and all, my heart had been busy creating its very own bypass system, growing tiny new arteries in place to compensate for the big one closing. I am absurdly proud of my creative, industrious little heart.

I must give props to my doc, and also to the head cardiac nurse. My own doc took my discomfort very seriously and scheduled the tests. The nurse came in the following day and congratulated me on knowing my own body, acting as my own advocate and insisting on care. I guess this is a pretty rare situation, so, once again I get to serve as a warning to others.

So, to my new normal. I've been adjusting to even more new meds, these are targeted to help the new arteries finish their growth and completely replace the artery lost to the blockage. I'm still living with the thumping, and side symptoms, and while they've only abated a little, they're not so scary. The worst had happened, the artery is closed, and I lived anyway. I have to decide if I can live with this as my new normal or face other, more specialized procedures, possibly, ultimately, bypass surgery. It's been a lot to process. Adapting to new medications is always a challenge for me. A part of my brain seems to be focused on those new arteries, encouraging them in their work, leaving me distracted and turned inwards.

For all of its challenges, 2016 will go down as the year I lived anyway, twice. It seems clear to me that there is something yet that I'm meant to do, and I'm hoping and praying that I don't figure it out anytime soon. For the past couple of years life has been something that's happened to me, I've been pretty content with rolling with the punches and waiting to see how it all works out. Lately, though, I've been thinking it might be time to pick a direction and get going. I mean, seriously, if you don't know where you're going, how can you tell if you're making good time?

About the yellow

There was no doubt that the applique needed some yellow. It was always just a matter of how the yellow would get there. Originally I had intended to embroider simple flowers, just lazy daisies, in several shades of yellow pearl cotton. I even stitched a few in place. But it just didn't work for me.

I decided to just stumble ahead and hope that an idea would present itself, and it finally did. I've been trying to be less literal in my applique design. I think my science background just hungers for accuracy. But my flower garden isn't a faithful rendition of any real flowers. I could call them zinnias, or cottage roses and you'd probably go along. And all those circles I like to toss in, what are those supposed to be in real life?

It occurred to me that if random circles are okay, perhaps commas could work. It's a shape that I like a lot. It's the shape of a single feather in traditional quilting. It's a paisley, or a petal. They have a bit of motion, with that little curve by the point.

So, out came a scrap of Wash Away Sheets.

I used a pencil to sketch out the shapes, using the original placement lines for the embroidery flowers to suggest the size. (I've traced over them with sharpie here so they are easier to see.)










Working with the same fabrics from the yellow pieced block, I made up a few, just to test out the idea, and I liked it!

Since I figured I'd roughly need about six thousand templates (slight exaggeration, it's actually closer to a hundred), I recreated the shapes using my Silhouette and let the machine do the cutting.

Yeah, that's a little bit of yellow there. I didn't plan, just made an assortment using three different yellow fabrics and three different sizes of commas.

So, I'm busy stitching down commas. My literal brain really wants to add a couple of green lazy daisies to the base of each comma, just to give them a place to grow from, you know? But I'm resisting. At this point it's hard to tell if what I'm adding is improving the design or just a ploy to prevent me from finishing.

Thanks so much for all your kind comments and concern. I'm feeling terrific. I've worked through the shock of having a heart attack, which is something that happens to other people, and celebrating the extra time I have been given.

Happy to still be here

There is no other way to say it than to just say it. In the early hours of March 7, 2016 I had a heart attack. I'm fine. Honestly. Because I knew the early warning signs, which are very different in women, I got to the hospital in plenty of time to avoid permanent damage to my heart.

I won't go into all the gory details, just suffice it to say that the monstrous heart burn and jaw pain were enough early warning to have me concerned. The nausea and lightheadedness that followed sealed the deal.

The five minute drive to the hospital gave me just enough time to consider my mortality and be grateful for matching (and clean) underwear (not that anyone besides me noticed). Just mention chest pain and you won't be wearing much very quickly.

The first blood test was inconclusive, the second blood test changed all that, and the third blood test had me bundled off to the cath lab for some quality time with a balloon and a stent to repair a completely blocked right artery.

Within 36 hours my blood enzyme levels had returned to normal levels and I was sent home to start my new life as a heart attack survivor. Because we got there so early in the attack I have nearly no damage to my heart. It's funny, on one hand I don't feel any different at all. I'm still me, and yet everything has changed. I'm shopping for stylish medical alert bracelets and nitro pill holders.

The hardest part was telling my family. To be honest, I felt pretty ashamed, certain that I had brought this on myself. The marvelous cardiac care nurses assured me that being embarrassed was a waste of good energy. I don't have any underlying conditions, despite being overweight, my blood pressure and cholesterol are just fine. Let's face it: my sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. If just one woman's heart is also spared because of what happened to me then I've done my job.

I made sure to call my sons myself. I didn't want them to have even a moment's panic while Kent got from "Mom had a heart attack" to "but she's okay". I figured if they heard my voice they would already be reassured. My youngest son assured me that I couldn't die, I didn't have the most fabric yet. (Yeah, he's a keeper.)

I'll be on special meds for at least a year while my body gets comfortable with the stent. It will take a little while to get all of my energy back and to get past that feeling of fragility that comes when a crucial body part misbehaves.

It seems that having such a great outcome means there must be something left for me to do in this world, hopefully still a long way off. What ever it might be, I'm already back to putting the finishing touches on A Fine Romance. I think I can be forgiven for missing the Tuesday deadline for basting the thing. I was in the hospital with a heart attack after all. (I plan to claim "heart attack" now anytime I feel the need to princess out, I'm going to milk it for all its worth.)

If you're a woman, or love a woman, please make sure you understand what a heart attack looks like so you can have the same great outcome as I have. Just google it and read several articles. It might just save your life too.