Words for Wednesday-Getting the boot

For this weeks Words for Wednesday entry we are linking up with River over at Drifting through life.

This true story began with a comment  I made on River's blog about a pair of green boots that I own.

This week's words are:
suburbia, concessions, morning, process, blackness, overkill
and/or:
instantly, matinee, regularly, whispering, kicked, height

And straight from River: Let the creativity begin! 😎

Getting the boot

The early morning process is exactly the same every day, he wakes up just as the sun rises and pulls his boots from behind the closet door right next to his bed.

They don't live in suburbia but in a rural area. The demands of owning horses, chickens, and other animals deem the need to feed and water them regularly, and these boots have kicked through a lot more than just dust and grass.

These boots have been through many things with him, looking at them now you can see that they are far from being new, but the concessions of being beaten, scraped, and abused proves that they are indeed his favorite.

There was a time when these boots were called stellar, but we will get to that later. He went all the way from California to Lubbock, Texas before he found these boots, his intention was for a new "dress pair" of boots and these were selected, he didn't necessarily like the green tops at first, the green is a little much as far as the looks go, he told his wife.

She told him "I think the green looks good" but when he tried them on and stood to full height, the decision was made, these were now his everyday boots, he actually threw his old boots into the box and began wearing the green boots right away.

On the ninth day of January in 2014, he was raking leaves in the backyard. He suddenly became tired and winded so he went inside to rest, he picked up a book “Linthead: Growing Up in a Carolina Cotton Mill Village” and sat down to continue reading it.

To make a long story short, he was instantly struck with a sharp pain behind both ears, the beginning of a migraine he thought, and being forced to go to the emergency room by his wife and father in law was overkill in his opinion, he described the pain to the Doctor as cold ice picks being shoved into both ears at once.

After an EKG the Doctor came back into his room and said "I'm sending you to Palm Springs where they can take care of you" He replied "Palm Springs, for a migraine?" The Doctor smiled, patted him on the leg and said, "You are having a Heart Attack Son."

While loading me onto a gurney the paramedic said "Jimmy I'm going to take your boots off" he held them up looking at them for a minute, "Man those are some stellar boots Jimmy" that was the last I saw of my boots for awhile.

I knew that I was in trouble when I saw Cindy's face through the back window of the ambulance. She was following in our car and the sudden look of fear on her face when the siren began blaring told me this was serious. Lights, sirens, nitro doses, and a lot of calming talk happened during the quickest ride I've ever made to Palm Springs.

During the matinee performance in the Cath lab at Desert Regional Medical Center is where the rest of my clothing disappeared. Without anesthesia they went into a vein in my groin with a catheter, a procedure that removed a 100% blockage and inserted a stent into an artery supplying blood to my heart. As my world was enveloped in blackness when I passed out from the pain, I thought they were killing me, but they were instead actually saving my life.

I did suffer another heart attack and had open-heart surgery a year later, I now have a defibrillator implanted and feel really good at where I am in my life. My advice to you is to never ignore any strange symptoms you may have, because they could point to something really serious. It's better to overreact than to ignore a signal your body is giving that you need help. Now back to Palm Springs.

There was a lot of whispering at the side of my bed while they thought I was sleeping, talk of how lucky I was, my strange symptoms, and the scary fact that by all rights I should have never made it to the hospital, but I did make it and a week later I was reintroduced to my boots.