Am I dying?

I was sitting at the computer wondering if I could hold off having my breakfast for a couple more hours when my body suddenly went all funny.

First I felt overheated.  That happens now and then and I have just called it menopause and ignored it.

Then there was a touch of nausea which I attributed to being hungry but then I started getting the fluttering sensation in my chest and the slightly breathless, off colour, feeling that goes with it.

I haven’t had the combination very often.  Usually I get one or the other but rarely all three at once.

This time the things God told me about my heart being weak came to mind so I put my fingers on my wrist to see what was happening with my heartbeat.

It was pausing!

The fluttering, breathless, off colour feeling was coming right after a series of breaks in my heart beat or so it seemed.

Pulse, pulse, nothing, nothing, pulse, and the feelings would come then, pulse, nothing, pulse, pulse, pulse and the feelings would go away only to return the next time the pulse didn’t come for a few seconds.

The feelings, the attack, the palpitations, whatever its called have eased but I still feel strange.

I’m a little confused.  This happened after I had gone for quite a long time (for me) without any diet coke.  I thought that was supposed to improve things not make it worse.

Unless the steady flow of caffeine has, like an iron lung dictates the breathing, taken over my heart rate and it needs to be weaned off it?

It was a peculiar experience.  When you feel your heart beating via your pulse and then it suddenly stops, starts and stops again you wonder what you will do if it doesn’t start again the next time.

My life didn’t pass before my eyes but it came into sharp focus.

If this is it, I thought, what will it mean?

It meant I’d never know what was in the chests I had dug up in the game I was playing.  It meant I wouldn’t be able to buy my kids their birthday and Christmas presents this year.  It meant I would not be able to move in with them after all.

It meant it was over.  All of it.

I got up from the chair and made my diet breakfast.  Maybe that would fix things, I thought, while another part of me wondered if it would push me over the edge and kill me.

Maybe, I thought briefly, I should go to the hospital but that would be a hassle and I don’t want to be in hospital.  I don’t want heart surgery or medications.

I’m not suicidal any more but I do not like this world.  I don’t.  I do not like the things people do to hurt others.  I don’t want to breath the same air as child molesters.  I don’t want to inhabit the same planet as people who maim and torture others for fun.  I am well and truly ready to die and be done with it all!

I’ve lived 50 years, most of them for my children, and that’s quite enough for me.  My kids don’t need me any more although I have no doubt at all that they love me and want me around.  I have more to offer them, on a financial level, dead than alive now anyway.

I was never cut out for this world.  As a child I was so easily hurt and so easily upset.  When I saw the dead body of a cat on the road I would cry for days and worry about how much it might have suffered before dying.

As a teenager I let a man rape me to protect his son.  It was during my time as a hitch-hiking run-away.  He stopped to pick me up and I saw he had a two year old child in the car so I felt safe accepting the ride.  He offered to feed me so I let him take me to his house believing he wouldn’t do anything wrong in front of his own child.

He fed me and offered me a shower which I accepted.  When I got out of the shower he attacked me.  He had sent his son next door.

I fought him off and he threatened to hurt me.  I told him to do his worst.  I was not afraid of being beaten.  I was fighting every inch of the way but then he asked me if I really wanted his little two year old son to be traumatized by walking in and catching his father beating me into submission then raping me.

I called his bluff but he was twice my age and I already knew the lengths a man will go to for sex so I had no doubt he meant it.

He said it had been three months since he’d had sex.  He said his wife was in hospital and had been very ill for a long time.  He said he was not letting me go until he had gotten what he needed.  He said his wife would never know because his son was too young to tell her but he was not too young to be traumatized.

He said he was too desperate to give up and if the boy walked in he would just have to watch the whole thing because he wasn’t going to stop until he got the sex he needed.

I believed him and I stopped fighting.  I couldn’t let that little boy be subjected to such horror.  It was bad enough that I had to live through it.  I couldn’t drag an innocent child through it too.

I’m harder now.  I don’t believe bulldust any more.  I have learned to look away and not think about it when I see a dead animal on the road but it still distresses me.  It still makes me want to cry.

There is nothing in this world for me apart from my family and I have no doubt they will do fine without me.

I decided to put it all in Gods hands.  If tonight is my last night on earth then so be it.

I’m not going to the hospital.  I’m not going to my doctor yet.  I will go after I get the X-Ray done that she wants me to have which I still haven’t made an appointment for.

So I ate my breakfast, wondering if it would turn out to be my last meal, and I drank another diet coke and smoked my way through this entry.

In the back of my mind, every time I feel the heart palpitations, I wonder if these are the last words I will ever “speak” to anyone.

I kind of doubt it.  God said he has things he wants me to do and I don’t think he would have asked me to stick with the diet and cut down on the diet coke if I wasn’t going to be around long enough to do those things.

Just in case, however, I wanted to write this entry so my kids and family would know not to grieve on my behalf or feel I was in any way cheated.

They will cry if I die tonight, of course they will, but they should cry for themselves and not for me.  They should also remember I love them and will always love them and we will meet again in a nicer, a much nicer, place.  I hope!  And that, if I am about to die, is my dying wish.  That they will cling to God and let him guide them into heaven so I can see them again.

If these really are to be my last words then all that needs to be said is I hope God will bless you all as he has blessed me but I’m quite sure I will be back.

My heart doesn’t seem to be settling down though so perhaps I should go to bed and rest it.