“I made it through the rest of the semester without talking about my heart problems. I thought about dying suddenly at 23.” A new Personal History, by boissolm.
I first learned to fear my heart on the slopes of an active volcano. I was visiting Costa Rica with a college class and a local doctor. Near a sign that warned of unexpected eruptions, I felt a string of erratic beats flutter in my chest. I was more curious than concerned, but, when I mentioned them to the doctor, he looked grave. He told me to visit a cardiologist as soon as I got home.
One of the things that unsettled my heart, in those anxious years, was the weather, something else that I could not control. As a child, I wasn’t especially afraid of storms, not even the tornado that once ripped through my home town. But that had changed. During one thunderstorm, a gust sent my car skidding across the parking lot of my sailing club. I ran through the darkness to get inside, then hid my panic by burying my face in a friend’s shoulder.
The adrenaline lasted longer than the storm. Meteorologists called it a microburst—a brief, extreme downdraft within a thunderstorm that hit one small segment of the little peninsula of Catawba Island. The morning brought news of the calamity: power off for dozens of blocks, flooding in all the boroughs, houses destroyed, subway lines filled with water. Ultimately, forty-four New York City residents died. My journalism professors sensed an opportunity to learn about disaster reporting and breaking news, so, in the days that followed, I interviewed people who had lost their homes. Some survived the storm only to learn that their neighbors had died.
Eventually, the needle went in. The first dose of adenosine momentarily stopped my heart. But almost immediately, the palpitations came back. I squeezed my eyes shut, thinking that this might kill me and telling myself to think of family.I felt another burst of intense pressure and heat. And then the drumming ceased.
I was discharged at daybreak into the cold, gray streets. Many subway lines were still flooded, so we walked home. We went to bed as the sun rose. The morning after, I was exhausted and moved gingerly from the pain of the incisions. I was also elated. For the first time in years, I thought I could trust the steady beating of my heart.
“Body weather” became a kind of shorthand, in the private language between us, for the turbulence inside me. We often come up with our own words and phrases: the flu is “bubonz,” a silly riff on the bubonic plague; when we feel a cold coming on, we are “sick around the edges.”
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