Totally Clipped to the Heart

As I detailed in my last post, I’ve had a month of painful and uncanny heart palpitations. They’re uncomfortable, but they’re also elusive—intermittent, brief, and they happen at random hours, especially at night. They’ve never once happened while I’ve been hooked up to an EKG.

So! It’s time to wear a heart monitor!

This is not my first heart monitor rodeo. My first heart monitor was a Holter monitor back in 2009. The Holter monitor was the size of a 1970s Walkman. I wore it under my shirt, strapped above my belt line, with 5 wires attached to electrodes places around my chest. The tangle of wires went to both clavicles, my sternum, and both sides of my abdomen to get an accurate measure of my heart rhythm.

So in the height of “See Something, Say Something,” I spent a week walking around NYC with this. I walked past the armed officers stopping and frisking people at the subway entrances with a suspicious box strapped to me by a tangle of wires, nervously hoping no one saw something or said shit. My heart rate might have been artificially elevated, but at least if the NYPD saw me and overreacted, we’d all be able to tell exactly the moment my heart stopped.

I’ve worn other monitors since; this is of the most noticeable places in all of my illnesses where I’ve seen the rapid pace of technological progress. My second heart monitor had the same number of wires but was smaller than a deck of cards. But the one I’m wearing now 20 years later is tiny: the size of six quarters with nothing more than a two inch butterfly of electrodes and adhesive flying diagonally between my heart and my collar bone. All I had to do is shave a chunk of my chest the size of my hand and slap it on.

There’s a mechanical button in medical plastic grey with a couple of lights on it. It looks identical to the attack buttons in Street Fighter II. It is not an alarm; I’m to click on it any time I notice my heart doing anything funky or suspicious to log it. Which mean it functionally works like a Star Trek combadge. Tap it when I want to talk to someone, as long as the only thing I want to say is “My heart sucks right now,” and the only potential response I can expect to receive is a summary report my cardiologist will receive in a month and then further summarize to me.

The frustrating thing about all this is the knowledge that nothing new is going to come of this. I’ve done this so many times by now that I’ve forgotten some of them. When my doctor prescribed me the device I immediately received a text to complete the sign up…and noticed that I still had message history in the thread from the last time I apparently wore this device years ago.

And then I remembered that I’d made that morbid joke about the device and the NYPD before. I’ve gone through this shit multiple times before and its been so unremarkable (and only mildly unpleasant) that I’ve forgotten about it. This is what chronic illness looks like: I occasionally rediscover that I’ve gone through complicated medical ordeals that fade into the background because they’re only moderately uncomfortable, rather than some of the most miserable things I’ve ever gone through. I often find out I’ve made the same bad jokes before.

These tests are forgettable because they don’t reveal anything new. This test is going to discover that I have heart palpitations because I had open heart surgery in 2008 and now my heart has permanent issues with timing. It’s irritating to not have a diagnosis beyond “We cut you open awhile back and you’re still damaged, oh well.”

There’s an old Bill Hicks routine1 that’s been coming back to me as I go through this. Hicks was a lifelong smoker who routinely went after health nuts and those who condemn smoking; he wanted to remind them that “Non-smokers die…every day. Sleep tight!”

You see, I know you entertain some type of eternal life fantasy because you do not smoke cigarettes. May I be the first to pop that little fuckin’ bubble of yours and send you hurtling back to the truth? You’re dead, too. Ahahahahahahahaha!

Ha! Ha! Have a good evening.

A-ha!

And you know what doctors say: “Shit, if only you’d smoked, we’d have the technology to help you!

It’s the people dyin’ from nothing that are screwed.”

I got all sorts of neat gadgets waiting for me, man.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about this throughout the entire ordeal. I know it’s good to not have an actual diagnosis. There’s nothing specifically wrong with me. There’s likely nothing wrong with me other than the occasional heart seizures that come from having had an operation two decades ago. But I almost want a diagnosis, because then I’d have something wrong with me, and if I had something wrong with me, then they could start to treat it with all sorts of neat gadgets.

I know that’s dumb, for many reasons, but most principally the fact that just because they have a diagnosis doesn’t mean they have a treatment2. A good diagnosis of “We didn’t find shit,” is infinitely better news that “We found some shit.”

My heart will calm eventually, as it’s always done, and I can go back to worrying about my other failing organs and body parts and bad habits. Still, it’s tough living with so much uncertainty that sometimes I find myself waiting for the bad news just so I can start dealing with it.

In honor of the two weeks I’ve had to wear this heart monitor: