Coke or Pepsi?

How a misdiagnosis almost killed me and fueled my search for the truth.

I was 19 the first time I nearly died. On the way to the hospital in the ambulance, I was praying continuously, which helped me to remain calm. My heart was going crazy at 175 irregular beats per minute.

When I arrived at the ER, it was the night shift because it was after 10 pm. The swarthy, smarmy on-call doctor leered at me suspiciously. Young man, racing heart, South Florida... he immediately thought, cocaine. Keep in mind, I was a naive, fairly innocent, "spiritual" teenager.

He says to me with a knowing smile, "Hey kid, you like coke?" I replied earnestly and obliviously, "I prefer Pepsi." He thought I was being a wise guy, so he ordered a full drug panel to confirm his certainty that I must be on drugs.

In the meantime, because he thought he knew what he didn't know, he gave me digitalis to slow my heart. Unfortunately for me, he had totally misdiagnosed me because of the filter he saw me through, and digitalis was the exact wrong thing to give me. In fact, I had a congenital heart defect that bypassed my heart's natural pacemaker. So, digitalis actually caused my heart to go even faster.

Now, my heart was really racing—240 irregular beats per minute. You don't ever want to look over at your doctor and see a look of terror on his face. I was in SVT, supraventricular tachycardia, at bye-bye levels. Because he had mistakenly given me digitalis, if I went into cardiac arrest or if he wanted to try and shock my heart into a normal rhythm, it would definitely kill me. The only option now was to wait for the digitalis to be metabolized by my system.

In other words, I had to wait while my heart was at a ripping 240 irregular beats per minute. I should've been dead, but I had played football in high school, so my heart was in decent enough shape to tolerate the stress longer than if I'd been an older man. Their only choice was to put me in the CCU, the Coronary Care Unit, where the average patient age was above 90 and there were two nurses per patient.

I thought of a ubiquitous 80s TV commercial for the Roach Motel: roaches check-in, but they don't check out. It was now a race against time. Would my heart tolerate this insane heart rate long enough to get the digitalis through my system so the anti-arrhythmia meds could start to work?

I was staring up at my monitor, watching my speeding, erratic pulse. Out of desperation to be distracted in the slightest, I started holding my breath to watch the pulse oxygen and breathing monitor go wild. It was the closest thing I had to a video game to distract me. We were barely beyond Pong back then, so this was only slightly less entertaining than that.

Meanwhile, my ashen-faced father was in the room. Another thing you don't want to see is your usually tough dad reduced to fear and worry. My heart was in this state for the next 17 hours.

The next afternoon, while watching Oprah on TV (1990 after all), I heard shouts of joy from the nurses' station. They rushed into my room; my heart was back in normal rhythm. The healing powers of Saint Oprah! Amen!

But something else was happening in those 17 wide-awake hours. I was facing my own death. I thought, I'm afraid to die, but if I make it out of this alive (yes, bargaining with God to live), I will devote my life to spiritual practice to find God and conquer the fear of death. And since we're being honest, I also thought of the girl I was in love with, who was very inconveniently, my best friend.

(Continued here)