I Went to the ER Sure It Was My Heart, and What I Found Taped to the Wall When I Woke Up Changed Everything

Somebody taped a sign to the wall of my ER room while I was asleep, and it took me almost a full minute to understand why my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

Two weeks ago I truly thought I was having a heart attack. The day started out ordinary.

It was the Saturday before our parish Harvest Dinner at St. Stanislaus here in Saginaw, Michigan. I’m 58, I’ve made pierogi for that dinner since I was a newlywed, and I had about six dozen pinched and lined up on floured dish towels across my kitchen table. Potato and cheddar, plus the sauerkraut ones for Father Mike, who pretends he doesn’t have a favorite.

Around 11:20 I reached up for the big stockpot and something grabbed me under the left shoulder blade. Not a cramp. A grab. It moved into my neck, then wrapped around my left ribs like a belt somebody kept pulling tighter. Every real breath stabbed.

I did what every woman my age does. I told myself it was nothing and lay down on the couch, figuring a nap would fix it. Lying flat was ten times worse. That’s when I got scared.

I called the nurse line at my doctor’s office. The girl asked me three questions and then said, very calmly, “Ma’am, go to the emergency room now. Don’t drive yourself.”

Gordie, my husband of 36 years, has never once moved fast for anything, but he came in from the yard still wearing one work glove and had the truck running before I found my purse. I made him cover the pierogi with plastic wrap first. He said a few words I won’t type here.

They took me back fast, which scared me more. Cold sticky circles all over my chest, red and green and white wires everywhere, an IV in the back of my hand. The blood pressure cuff squeezed my arm every fifteen minutes like it had a grudge. EKG. Portable X-ray. Two rounds of blood work, one for a heart attack, one for a blood clot in my lungs. I kept apologizing to my nurse, Yolanda, until she patted my foot and said, “Honey, stop saying sorry. Nobody comes here for fun.”

Gordie sat in that hard plastic chair eating vending machine peanut butter crackers and checking his phone. Over and over. I figured he was googling my symptoms, which he does, and which drives me crazy.

The waiting is the worst part. You lie there with the monitor beeping over your head and think about everything. My pierogi drying out. And Carly, which I try not to do more than once a day, because more than that and I can’t function.

Carly was my only child. She died nine years ago this January on I-75, on black ice, coming home from a gas station at 10:40 at night. She was 31. She left behind a little girl named Addison, who was six.

What I said to my son-in-law at the funeral luncheon is the worst thing I have ever done. Carly had gone out that night because Kyle wanted cigarettes and he’d already had a few beers. In the church basement, in front of everybody, over the ham and scalloped potatoes, I told him it should have been him in that car.

Kyle moved Addison up to Traverse City the next year and remarried. The phone calls stopped. Then the birthday cards came back unopened, and after a while I quit sending them. I haven’t seen my granddaughter in six years.

So that’s where my head was when whatever they put in my IV kicked in and I drifted off.

When I woke up, Gordie’s chair was empty. And on the wall across from my bed, stuck up with a strip of masking tape, was a sign.

“Get well soon, Mom! We love you!” A little red heart. Puffy stickers in the corners, the old kind, a rainbow and a smiling sun.

On the shelf beside me sat a vase of pink and white flowers that hadn’t been there before, and a small framed picture.

My first thought was that I was in the wrong room. Nobody calls me Mom. Nobody has called me Mom in nine years.

I pushed the call button. “Oh, you’re awake!” Yolanda said. “A young lady dropped those off while you were sleeping. Didn’t want to wake you.”

“What young lady?”

“Tall, blond ponytail. Didn’t leave a name.”

I asked her to hand me the sign. Part of me already knew. I needed to hold it to believe it.

The curly tail on the y in “you.” The M in “Mom” with that little loop on top, like a cursive M somebody gave up on halfway. The lopsided heart where a period should be.

I’d looked at that handwriting on birthday cards and grocery lists and permission slips for thirty-one years. I’d know it anywhere.

It was Carly’s.

My daughter, who has been resting at Mount Olivet Cemetery for nine years, had written me a get-well sign.

I sat there holding it until the blood pressure cuff squeezed twice. Then I asked Yolanda for the frame. It was a picture I hadn’t seen in years: me in my lavender church dress holding baby Addison at her baptism, Carly laughing beside us.

An index card was tucked into the corner. Rounder handwriting. A teenager’s.

“Grandma, Mom made this sign when you had your gallbladder out. I was four and I put the stickers on. Dad kept a box of her stuff in the garage and I found it last summer. Grandpa told me you were here. I’m 15 now. I hope it’s okay that I came. Addie”

Grandpa told me.

Gordie walked in right then with two coffees, saw my face, and stopped in the doorway. He didn’t try to pretend.

“How long?” I said.

“Two years, Sheil.”

Addison had found him on Facebook the summer she turned thirteen. Kyle found out and called Gordie himself. Gordie could come around. I couldn’t. Not until I apologized, and Kyle wasn’t going to be the one to ask me.

So every few weeks my husband drove two and a half hours north, told me he was at his brother’s deer camp, and sat in a Traverse City gym watching our granddaughter play volleyball.

“You lied to me,” I said. “Every one of those Saturdays.”

“I did.” He didn’t look away. “If I told you, you’d have had to choose between your pride and that girl, and I wasn’t sure you’d choose right. I’m sorry. I’d do it again.”

I wanted to throw the coffee at him. But he was right about me, and that hurt most.

That was all the phone checking. He’d texted Addie that morning. Kyle’s wife, Jenna, drove her down, and they’d been in the cafeteria an hour because Addie got scared to come back.

Then the doctor came in. Heart fine. No clot. X-ray clean. It was pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining around the lungs, which I’d never heard of. I should have been relieved. I was shaking.

“Give me your phone,” I told Gordie.

Kyle answered on the fourth ring. I didn’t have a speech. I just said, “Kyle, it’s Sheila. What I said to you at that luncheon was cruel, and it wasn’t true. You didn’t kill her. I needed somebody to blame and you were standing right there. I am so sorry.”

Silence. I thought he’d hung up.

Then he said, “I told myself the same thing every day for about five years. It was easier to believe when you said it too.” A pause. “She’s downstairs. Go see her.”

I didn’t have to. Addie was already standing in the doorway with Jenna’s hand on her back. Blond ponytail, navy volleyball hoodie. And Carly’s eyes. Exactly Carly’s eyes.

“Hi, Grandma,” she said, like it was a question.

I opened my arms, wires and all, and she came.

They discharged me at 9:15 that night. Walking out of an ER with nothing wrong with your heart feels a little embarrassing, like you wasted everybody’s evening. Yolanda saw it on my face and said, “Honey, that’s the best kind of night we get.” I’m choosing to believe her.

The pierogi were fine, by the way. Gordie wrapped them good.

Addie is coming for Thanksgiving, with Kyle and Jenna. She wants to learn her mom’s pierogi, which were really my mother’s, which were really her mother’s. The sign is on my refrigerator now. And I’ve forgiven Gordie for deer camp. Mostly.

If you said something terrible to someone, don’t wait for a hospital bed. Call them.

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction written for entertainment. Names, characters, places and events are invented, and the photo is used for illustration only. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.