The Time I thought I was Going to Die

The Time I thought I was Going to Die

Anonymous

10/03/2022

During this past summer I told myself that I needed to take on more responsibilities and become as independent as a newly high school graduate could be. After being in sports and taking hard classes in high school I never had the time or energy to get a job, so I finally decided to get one as soon as school ended. Not only to become more independent by providing for myself but mainly for my family. Growing up in Miami was a blessing and a burden for my family, it is our home and we have many wonderful memories living here, but on the other hand it brought a lot of financial struggles. It was hard to live in this expensive city. I constantly saw my parents stress, cry, and fight about how we were going to be able to pay the mortgage, have money for food, pay off credit cards, and much more. And within the past year my father had finally retired after working hard for 49 years so now more than ever my family needed my help. I got an all in one job at a Coral Gables restaurant. I was a server, food runner, hostess, and buser, and I had to make ice cream, dessert, and coffee orders for the ice cream parlor section of the restaurant. The restaurant was understaffed so that only meant I had to do double to triple the work I was already doing. Most people would have left this kind of job but I stayed because the money was pretty decent and honestly I did like the hustle of staying busy, running around, and finding ways of getting good tips. Eventually all this work caught up with me. I was already juggling many different things in my personal life, but now I was working 6 days out of the week and most days were double shifts: opening to closing. This one saturday night it was comedy night, our restaurant was incredibly packed. We ran out of menus, tables, important ingredients, and the most hectic was the bar. There were so many orders and people to keep track of with the staff count of only four including the bartender. That day I took on another double shift 11am to 1am with only a 30 minute break. Around 11:30pm is when I was really starting to feel the effects of doing this all week on top of my stressful personal life. I had just finished taking an order for a couple and went to tell one of my coworkers that I was sorry but I was feeling very dizzy and I needed to go outside for a minute to breathe. I had felt bad leaving them more work to do but I physically could no longer push through what I felt. I went outside and immediately fell to the ground. It felt like the world was spinning and my heart rate dropped. After what felt like a few minutes I finally had enough strength to get up and sit on a milk carton box that was next to a dumpster and this was where a series of frightening events began to take place. My coworker noticed I was taking a long time outside so she alerted the owner and manager of the restaurant they came outside to check on me and immediately rushed over to me in distress. The owner told my manager to get me water and juice to help give me some strength, it hardly did anything and I could barely manage to bring the bottle to my mouth. My face began to turn really pale, almost translucent, you could see all the veins in my face. I then started to lose consciousness. I would stare off, my eyes would roll back, and my whole body was shaking. This continued to happen a couple more times, which made the owner extremely nervous so he decided to call 911 and my parents. What felt like forever but in reality was only a couple minutes both an ambulance and my parents showed up and I was surrounded by an abundance of distress and fear. I was unresponsive to those trying to talk to me and get my attention but was a bit aware of what was happening. I continued to stare off, eyes rolling back, and my whole body would shake making everyone including paramedics think I was having seizures. They rushed me into the ambulance and tried asking me a bunch of questions most of which I don’t remember. During all of this life felt like a blur of some sort of horrible nightmare I couldn't tell if all of this was actually happening, at the moment it was so scary I began to panic which made my symptoms even worse. The moments of consciousness that I had I would just think: “How did this happen?”, “Why is this situation so severe”, “Am I going to die?”, “Am I having seizures”, and “All the hard work, stress, and pressure I put on myself was for what? Look where it got me.” I thought I was going to die, I was so incredibly scared, I felt so weak and so out of control of my own body. I just began to pray and ask God to be with me and surround me with his protection. We finally made it to the emergency section of South Miami Baptist Hospital around 12:00am. The paramedics are describing to the hospital nurses what had happened to me and my symptoms. I continued to have the same symptoms and everything felt like a blur and all around me it seemed to look whitish. They rushed me into my own room, and I had a bunch of hospital nurses/ doctors start running tests, hooking me up to wires, and asking me a bunch of questions about how I was feeling. When I was mostly just feeling extremely scared. After a couple minutes I began to feel more calm and my strength seemed to be coming back more by the minute. I was fully conscious now and I was so relieved I started crying and so did my parents. I really gave everyone a huge scare. The physician came in and told us basically what caused everything to happen. She said my body was extremely stressed and overworked, dehydrated, not eating enough, and low on important vitamins, and on top of that I was having a panic attack which made this all feel like the end of the world for me. I was prescribed to stay home and take a rest week, make sure I was well nourished, and find ways to manage my stress and anxiety. I did all and quit my job and I soon got much better. Since then I have not had another incident like this. But this experience taught me a lot, I had put so much pressure on myself throughout my life and now more than ever. I always thought I needed to do better and become a busy person who tried their hardest to be the best version of themselves. Which is a good thing to aspire to be but to a certain degree, there must be limits and a balance, I ended up making myself go through a life threatening event and wound up in a hospital. This experience taught me to be kind to myself, and know when stress is healthy or not. Most people put themselves through so much pressure but in the end it is not worth it. Our well being and happiness is what should matter most and we must put that first.