Strong earthquake jolts Anchorage
by Rachel D’Oro
The Associated Press
9/20/10
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – An earthquake jolted Anchorage on Monday and was felt well beyond Alaska’s largest city.
The 4.9 magnitude quake struck at 1:24 p.m. about 10 miles southwest of Anchorage, according to earthquake monitors.
There were no reports of injury or damage, but people reported that the earthquake “shook awful hard,” said Cindi Preller, a geologist with the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center.
One man who was standing close to the epicenter also had been through the 9.2 magnitude quake that struck Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1964, Preller said. That quake, the second-largest in recorded history, triggered a tsunami and left about 130 people dead.
“He was pretty rattled,” Preller said of the caller. “It kind of shook back some of those memories.”
For the last several weeks, I have been having more arrhythmias than usual (and arrhythmias are usual after a severe heart attack.).
By the time the erratic heartbeats reach about twenty times a minute, my heart feels like it is in contortions and trying to escape out of my chest. It is very hard to focus, and very anxiety provoking. I have had some friends tell me, “I’ve had arrhythmias — the doctor says they are almost always benign — they almost always go away.” This may be an attempt at re-assurance, but I would much rather be understood than re-assured. To someone who has been through a heart attack or cardiac arrest, arrhythmias are much frightening than to someone who has not had a cardiac event (and they can be frightening anyone.)
In animal psychology there is something called “one-trial learning” — all it takes is one shocking or near death experience and the animal will be severely frightened by anything that resembles a stimulus at the time of the event; it is almost impossible to de-condition this animal to the mortality associated stimulus. Arrythymias to cardiac patients can be extremely anxiety provoking for this very reason — they are associated with near death experiences.
I would suggest that the next time your heart patient friend tells you they are having arrhytmias, tell them you that you can’t even imagine how scary that it is and touch them in some way. Understand us, don’t try to falsely re-assure us. We know we are about to die. Almost for sure. It happened before, just like this.
