Be still my beating heart
As the results of the US election became clear, my daughter texted asking if my heart was doing OK … with good reason
So, the doctor says, ‘We’re going to electrocute you in the heart’.
I, thinking I’ve heard him wrong, respond, laughing, ‘I thought you just said you were going to electrocute me in the heart’.
‘That’s exactly what I said,’ he answers, with no laugh, because he has no sense of humour. He just has bad news. He’s one of those doctors. He knows I’m a journalist and he’s decided (he’s told me this) that I can take the facts as they are, no soft soap, no gentle lead-in, no caress of the shoulder.
‘That doesn’t sound like it’s a thing,’ I say, trying to be the hardened journalist he expects me to be, whilst being betrayed by a quivering lower lip.
‘It is a thing,’ he says, brutally. ‘There are some risks. You might have a stroke while you’re under.’
Under, meaning asleep. Under anaesthetic. At least there’s that. They won’t electrocute me in the heart while I’m awake. The downside being I might wake up and discover that I can’t eat yoghurt without losing half of it down my chin. Or I might not wake up at all.
How quickly conversations about medical science cross over into the existential, or even theological — typically the space I’m more comfortable in. I try to think of something theological to say in response to his brutal empiricism. But I have nothing.
My heart is in atrial fibrillation. It doesn’t get more empirical than that. Because it’s been in AF for more than a few months, the doctor calls it persistent, like a daughter who wants a driving lesson.
I tell the doctor I have a theory about how the AF became persistent.
‘It’s my daughter’s fault,’ I say.
‘What did she do?’
’She gave me a bucket of liquorice allsorts for Christmas.’
‘I don’t follow.’
I have to explain everything to this empiricist doctor.
‘I ate them all in one go. And that’s the week I went into AF.’
He looks at me like he’s starting to doubt that I was ever a journalist at all.
I remind him that I am also a doctor.
‘A doctor of what?’
‘Theology.’
He says nothing but I know what the eye-roll means — that theologians ought to believe their body is a temple and forego eating a bucket of liquorice allsorts in one sitting.
Being a theologian also explains why I’m inclined to believe my AF was caused by liquorice allsorts, even in the absence of fact or science. This is something I’ve observed over the past few years watching US politics from afar — that otherwise very intelligent people of faith can believe crazy things and crazy people without any evidence, and even because actual evidence — like facts, or science, or logic — says the opposite.
When you grow up believing that your belief trumps every other form of knowing, you are prone to believing anything that confirms a pre-existing bias. For years, my heart has gone in and out of AF after I’ve eaten sugary treats. That’s my bias. Ergo … bucket of liquorice allsorts … persistent AF.
So, I’m sent to hospital for what they call a cardioversion, which is a benign way of saying electric shock to the heart. I’m thinking this is a ‘Take off your shirt and lie on your back Dr Williams’ kind of a thing, but no — it’s ‘surgery’. Which means I have to put on a hospital gown, and a mask, a hospital hat, and underpants made from rice paper.
I’m taken to a room where a dozen other people are waiting for their surgery, all of them dressed like me. Apart from the one Muslim woman, who is dressed like none of us.
It feels like a sci-fi movie. I’m suddenly very glad of the mask because while I’m concerned about the electric shock to the heart, I’m more concerned about the way I look and who might recognise me. I’m also concerned that I’m not able to sit in a natural way. I’m manspreading more than usual, which means that my paper underpants are exposed to the room and there’s not a thing I can do about it without drawing undue attention to the lagoon creature that’s lurking beneath them.
One by one, everyone is taken for surgery before me. This process takes hours. So long, in fact, that some of the patients turn on the television that’s fixed to the wall so they can watch the Paralympics. But all that appears on the screen is a “weak signal” notification. A nurse comes in and says ‘Just leave it for a while, the signal might get stronger’, which is the equivalent of believing that liquorice allsorts can cause persistent AF.
Finally, it’s just me and the Muslim woman, who is dressed in full niqab. She has refused to take off her head gear so is sitting there with a hospital hat on top of the niqab and her hospital mask beneath the veil that’s covering her face. I know that I look ridiculous in my rice paper undies, but I’m glad I look nothing like a novelty Pez dispenser, which I suppose is the price she’s willing to pay to uphold her faith.
My time comes and I’m taken to pre-op, where a young girl appears at my bedside like an elf and checks my details. I assume that she’s on work experience from high school but she says that she’s my anaesthetist, and before I can say what I’m thinking, about growing up in a house of faith where a career in medical science at such a young age was never an option, she has a lure in my hand and is feeding a length of hose pipe up my arm.
Then suddenly, it’s all on. Two suitably aged nurses come to my bed and tell me what they’ll each be doing during the procedure, like Thing 1 and Thing 2, but I can’t process anything of what they’re telling me because they’re also wheeling me out of the room and down a corridor at Formula One speeds. One of them drives like Logan Sergeant and steers straight into a door frame.
’She’s a terrible driver,’ Thing 1 says. I have a sexist joke on the tip of my tongue, but remember just in time that in a few minutes my life will be in their hands.
In a blur, we’re in the OR and the nurses are shooting instructions at me like they’re firefighters trying to get me out of a burning house.
What I hear is: ‘Pull your gown down to your waist’ — which I do — then they stick a freezing cold pad on my left breast.
Next: ‘Sit up and lean forward.’ I do this too, and they stick another freezing cold pad on my back.
Then I’m lying flat again, and one of them, I think the teenage anaesthetist, says ‘Take off your mask’, which I do, and one of the nurses laughs and says, ‘Oh there’s a big beard behind that mask’ — which is weird because at no point has the mask covered the entirety of my face, so they must have assumed the tuft of beard hair that was poking out the sides was just the outline of a beard, not an actual full and big beard — but who lets their facial hair grow like that? Religious zealots, that’s who.
‘Deep breaths, in and out,’ my anaesthetist says, as Thing 1 or Thing 2 shoves an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth. I do as she says, but the breaths clearly aren’t deep enough, because she tells me to do it again, and again, and again. I suddenly picture a tall tube with a ping pong ball inside it, but my breaths aren’t enough to make the ball hit the mark. Is this tube in the OR, or is it an old memory from the amusement park?
The room begins to spin. Not because of the anaesthetic, but because I’m hyperventilating. Voices come at me from all directions. Thing 1, Thing 2, the anaesthetist, and a young fellow who’s suddenly at my side, like an angel. I’m sucking more air into my chest than I ever have before and my ribs are aching. The lights in the room start to sparkle, like this actually might be the end of this dimension and the beginning of the next … if indeed there is a next.
And for a fleeting moment I realise that whether you’re a person of faith, or a person of science, or perhaps an amalgam of the two, we all end in the same place, in a moment of total surrender, and whether we fight that moment or give ourselves over to it, the outcome is the same.
This a moment from which I may not wake.
There’s a rush of warmth up my arm as the anaesthetic is released to do its thing, and the lights go out.
I wake up minutes later. I’m in the recovery room. It feels like I’ve had the best sleep in years, except there’s a burn mark on my left breast, where it looks like I’ve leant across a hot sandwich press.
‘You’re in sinus rhythm,’ a male nurse at my bedside says, which is a good thing. AF bad. Sinus rhythm good.
They bring me lunch. A cup of coffee. A ham sandwich. And a yoghurt, which I’m cautious about eating because I’ve read somewhere on the internet that excess dairy can cause AF.
And sure enough, five minutes later the male nurse returns and says he has bad news — my heart has gone back into AF … which means I’ll have it for the rest of my life.
The next time I see the doctor I’m going to tell him that it’s not just liquorice allsorts that cause persistent AF. Yoghurt does it too. I have the empirical science to prove it.