What I Learned In A Brazilian Emergency Room
My family and I lived as missionaries in Maués, Amazonas, Brazil. There, we taught English as a Second Language and worked with an organization that shared the gospel as they drilled wells in regional indigenous communities.
The heat and humidity are brutal in the region. I always joke that the Amazon has four seasons: hot and hotter, plus wet and wetter. I ranked the temperature by how many shirts I changed and how many cold showers I took daily.
My point? Overheating was commonplace, but one afternoon, it was worse than usual, with shortness of breath and chest pains. So I did what any guy would do: I hid it from my wife and waited until I was too sick to delay any longer.
When I arrived at the Hospital, I was lucky. The regional cardiologist was there and took over my care.
He determined I was in full-blown Atrial Fibrillation; my heart wasn’t pushing blood properly, so I couldn’t catch my breath, and I was almost blacking out at times.
The Hospital didn’t have the drugs needed to convert my heart back to a normal rhythm, and my wife had to find them at a local pharmacy. God was with her, and she found them at the first pharmacy.
After a second night in the Hospital’s emergency room, and with the new drugs, my heart still hadn’t converted…
