My Fibulating and Exultant Heart

I had complained to the doctor: I get so tired and when I go upstairs, I get out of breath and kind of  dizzy.

“ Hmm”, he said, taking in my white hair, aged skin, and no doubt the easy way I sat down, upright in the chair next to his desk.” Hmm” he said again, not surprised but not concerned, and took my wrist to feel the pulse. For several minutes neither of us said anything as he stared fixedly at the clock. Then he released my hand and said, “Did anyone ever tell you you have an irregular heart beat?”

“No. Taking my cue from him I am also not alarmed. “What does that mean?”

“Well,” he said, it’s like this. You have four chambers in your heart, two on the bottomed and two on the top.

I think, What kind of chambers: the judge’s chambers? My ladies’ chamber? The place where the chamber pot is kept? Images flick by like slides in the projector on the screen of my mind.

“The blood comes into the bottom right chamber and is pumped into the left chamber.”

Pumped? I see the pump of my childhood with a big handle you worked up and down to get water from the well. Clang, gush, clang, gush. Or are we pumping iron here?

“The heart is a muscle, he says, picking up on my last unexpressed mental image  and if the blood doesn’t get from one side to the other in a timely fashion it may make you feel weak, or dizzy. I hear the pump of my childhood  make a scratchy, gulping wheezy sound when there was no more water in the well.

“When we get older” … (where does he get this we – I am 85 and he is perhaps 45, almost half my age.) “When we get older the heart muscle gets tired and sometimes misses a beat.” Well, he didn’t say it quite like that but that’s what he meant.

I take all this in. My mother’s parents died within a year of each other when they were 50. My mother herself was diagnosed with heart disease when she was 50 but lived another 30 years, thanks to modern medicine and modern medical expertise. I am 85 and only now have had any touch of a heart problem and this doctor doesn’t seem a bit alarmed. I think of all the years I have lived so richly, so fully, without a sense of any final curtain, and exult in my good fortune.

“So, what do I need to do?” I ask, fleetingly grateful that we are in India where medications are cheap.

“Nothing,” he says, lightly, ” just take it easy and if you feel your heart racing lie down flat. “

I see myself lying down flat in the airport, or in the boat in Nova Scotia and remember what one old Vermont lady said when advised to build a fallout shelter in her basement. She looked straight at the extension director and said in a lazy country drawl “Spend two weeks in my cellah and yu’d drown.” Spend two minutes  in the bottom of my boat and yu’d drown.

“That’s all?”

That’s all”, he says, smiling reassuringly,  “but you may need a pace maker some day.”

Some day Is not today, may not even be tomorrow or two years from now. I flip quickly through my “But I can still.. “ list. I ‘ll never sail a boat alone again  BUT I can still be in a boat with someone else. I can’t lift the kayaks on to the car, but once down I can still kayak with Anne and on my own. I don’t have the mind or the stamina to teach full length courses but I can still advise teachers. I can’t get down on the floor and roll around with the great grandchildren but I can still read stories and take trips with them. And there are always the birds! Small blessings become big blessings with this new perspective. My fibulating heart exults.

Cape Cod Writing Retreat, May 2019