A rapid response, an emergency heart procedure, and the moment my diagnosis became real
At some point during my first night in the hospital, I came closer to death than I ever had before. I woke suddenly from sleep to the coldest chill I’ve ever felt in my life. It was paralyzing. The call button was right next to my hand, but even reaching for it felt like a struggle.
When I finally pressed it, the nurse came in, took one look at me, and immediately called a Rapid Response. Within seconds, there were what felt like 10 people in the room. They took my blood pressure and it was 70/30. It was almost certainly even lower before they got there, while I was still lying there trying to understand what was happening to me.
I kept asking one of the nurses why it was so low. I couldn’t take my eyes off the blood pressure reading as I asked. She wouldn’t answer me. I must have asked a hundred times. I took that as a bad sign.
They rushed fluids into me—maybe a different kind than before, I still don’t know—and whatever they gave me eventually stabilized me, though my blood pressure stayed much lower than normal. Then I had to wait until the following morning to get more answers.
But that night stayed with me. The cold. The helplessness. The look on the nurse’s face when she saw me. The silence when I kept asking what was happening. It was the first time I truly felt how thin the line can be between being here and not being here.
The next morning, I was seen by a cardiologist. A technician performed an echocardiogram, and not long after she left, the doctor came rushing in after reading the results.
He told me I had a pericardial effusion—fluid surrounding my heart. That was why my blood pressure had dropped so low. The fluid was compressing my heart. I remember thinking: what was this fluid, and how had it gotten there?
He told me I needed an emergency procedure to drain it. As soon as he said it, I was wheeled off to the OR.
I heard the conversation in the OR. I heard every tool they called for. I heard the nurses question the doctor’s call for a certain needle size. I heard disagreements over other parts of the procedure. At one point, I even told the whole room that I was not happy being awake and able to hear everything that was happening.
Why didn’t they put me under? My understanding is because they weren’t sure they’d be able to wake me back up.
After the procedure, I was in intense discomfort. It felt like I was having trouble breathing. They sent me for an immediate CT scan. Thankfully, there was no additional damage. The procedure had gone exactly as the doctor intended. What I was feeling was my body reacting to a foreign object—a tube inserted into my chest to drain the effusion.
The fluid was sent to the lab for analysis, and I was moved to the Intensive Care Unit for monitoring. That specimen is what identified the cancer. We would later learn that the fluid itself was being produced by the cancer.
A few days later, I was transferred to another hospital in preparation for a possible pericardial window, in case the fluid did not stop accumulating. Thankfully, the initial chemotherapy worked and the fluid stopped building. But by then, I had already crossed a threshold in my mind. I had felt how close death could come.
But the medical emergency was only one part of what was starting. What I did not understand before this happened was that a life-threatening event does not just create a medical emergency. It creates a continuity emergency. Family, finances, childcare, work, legal documents, decision-making—everything suddenly matters at once. Living through that changed the way I think about what families need in place before crisis hits.