(The scene: not your own living room, or kitchen, or wherever you set up your little exo-brain, so you can read this. Instead, in spite of the rubberized suit and big floppy hat you're wearing, you're soaked to the skin, and we are bobbing frantically up and down in an inflated military-grade raft, in the white water rapids of a river in Colorado. Up and down, heaving right and left, cold river water splashing in our faces. Our guide struggles to keep us off the rocks, and for some crazy reason, I'm yelling, at the top of my lungs, trying to tell you...)
It started with dizziness.
Actually, it was worse than dizziness -- it was a kind of heavy, closing-in kind of feeling, that happened whenever I got up from my chair and walked upstairs. I never actually passed out, or even fell over -- it was just a unusually deep sense of sinking into a dark place in myself. And it happened more than once
I mentioned it to my new doctor -- the one who's been helping me find new medication for the life-long depression that only seems to deepen with age. Like a fine wine. But not as much fun. The doctor didn't think this dizziness was caused by the handful of pills he had me swallowing each day -- he said I needed to have my carotid arteries checked by a neurologist, because it could be heart trouble.
(Big splash of cold water)
After a quick physical (EKG included) showed no problems, my wonderful primary care physician indeed sent me to a neurologist. Just as Dr. Depression had recommended. I think I have a bigger medical team than Louis the Sixteenth. Think about it.
More tests, more electrodes pasted to my torso, more seismic graphs on strips of blue paper -- apparently, nothing of note to see, the new doctor -- we''ll call him Dr. Neurology -- said. How about a halter monitor? Just to make sure. And I'll see you in a month.
(It's a little calmer now, but there are more rapids just ahead...)
A week later, I'm in another office, in another building, talking with a charming woman whose birthday is two days before mine, but years later, of course. And because she's a fellow Libra, she's charming as she shoves sheaves of paper at me, for signatures and initials and thumb prints and little swipes of saliva, just for the records. And I go to another room, on another floor. Just follow the yellow linoleum stripe. Which leads me to a dimly-lit dead end, facing operating room doors ominously bolted shut. When I'm finally in the right place, I have more diodes and cathodes and amphitheaters taped all over me, and when I've pulled my t-shirt back over everything, there's a little black man-purse to wear around my neck, like a Hindu practitioner of puja, or one of the slower kids at summer camp. "Just bring it back to us tomorrow, sugar," a cheery nurse says. Easy for her to be so upbeat, I think. I don't see her wearing any man-purse.
One uneventful day and night later (I slept downstairs on the couch, lest John and I become entangled in my electronics, and we both fry at dawn), I dutifully return the equipment, and feeling ten pounds lighter, I take myself to the gym as a reward. Because that which does not kill you makes you sweat, waiting for that which does not kill you to change its mind.
(BIG SPLASH -- oh God, I'm glad we're both strapped into this thing. I think)
So I'm totally unprepared when the phone rings, later that same day (I'm all cleany from the gym, and still not dead yet), and it's my nice new Dr. Neurology saying I need to go into the hospital immediately, because according to the results of that deceitful man-purse contraption, my treacherous heart has been stopping -- naughty, naughty -- for whole seconds at a time, all night long. And under these conditions, there's only one answer: Pacemaker, stat!
(Now we're in one of those calmer places that look like so much fun on TV -- but can't they make it stop spinning around quite so much? And where do they get all this ice-water? I thought it was global warming, these days...)
But I'm mainly thinking two things. One: if I lived in another culture -- perhaps in a remote region of the Indian sub-continent -- I could make a nice living, and be worshiped on weekends, if I could stop my heart for five seconds at a time, on a regular basis. But here, in America, it's a medical emergency. Two: I've been through all this before. With another man-purse (although a bigger, clunkier one, as I recall), and that one showed a nocturnal heart-rate of something like nineteen beats per minute, for four hours, or roughly that of a hibernating bull frog. And, of course that time too, there had been the chorus of 'pacemaker, pacemaker, pacemaker', accompanied by honing of scalpels in the orchestra.
But that time I'd seen a pulmonologist (yet another doctor! Take that, Louis the Sixteenth!), who thought my heart was slowing because I wasn't breathing at night. Two sleep studies later (thousands of insurance dollars, to sleep badly in someone else's bed?), and Dr. Lung was proven right. Stow the pacemaker. Stab something else with those scalpels, thank you very much.
Instead, I got to wear a vacuum-cleaner on my face.
(Ah, finally, a nice calm stretch for a bit. We can actually take a breath, sit back in our frigid, completely soaked clothing, and look at the cottonwood trees on either bank, just out of reach, and slipping past just a little too quickly to be truly picturesque. By the way, where's the guide?)
So, for two whole years, I voluntarily wore, every night, a vacuum cleaner on my face. (Actually, a reverse vacuum cleaner, in that it forces air out, rather than in, thus inflating my lungs, instead of sucking them up and out, through its adorable little flexible hosery) I wore it faithfully, if reluctantly. I waited for its benefits to accrue -- no more naps necessary, I'd been told, unbelievable bounding energy, incredible mental acuity, all deriving from spending eight hours a night with The Alien installed over my nose and mouth. Yet I still fought to keep from drifting off during faculty meetings (which may have been more a matter of self-preservation, like opossums feigning death in the face of the unendurable); I still wondered who'd filled my work boots with cement when I wasn't looking; I still forgot that my reading glasses were in my own hand.
Plus, I worried about the mold issue, and where to get distilled water at midnight in Pennsauken, and what to do when my cat chewed holes in The Alien's trachea. The promised replacement hoses and face masks didn't arrive; I began strapping the vacuum cleaner in place only on weekends. And then, somehow, the durable black nylon carrying case, with the malign contraption safely zipped inside, found its way up into the attic...
(Brace yourself! Big turbulence! Just ahead! This looks... worse than ever!!!)
All this was five years ago, and now, today, Dr. Neurology has his marker ready to sketch out on my shaved chest just where they're going to make the incisions... And I'm trying to reach that same pulmonologist -- who I just bet would return my calls if I really were Louis the Sixteenth, if only out of curiosity -- so we can go through the whole dance: Realizing that the problem is not with my poor, squishy, syncopated heart, but with my dreams.
(Whoa! That was huge! You okay? Seriously, where's the freaking guide? I don't know how to paddle this thing! Where's Meryl Streep when you really need her???)
At night, when I dream, I hold my breath. I know this, because one of those sleep studies proved it. It was my second visit to that strange room, and the strange bed, sleeping across the aisle from other people who thought I was strange, but really they were strange... And now I had a vacuum cleaner strapped to my face. For the first time. (It's never as good as the songs say) And I had a dream -- oh, the usual crap about my mother, and the orphanage, but mixed up, the way dreams are, and as usual, I was full of piercing grief. And in my dream I started to cry. And I couldn't stop.
Crying, I realized, is principally an exhalation. And this particular dream-embedded exhalation didn't want to end. Instead, I froze, compressing my lungs, in an effort to finally push out all the available pain... Only because the vacuum cleaner rudely interrupted this very personal moment, did I wake up, remember the dream, and of course, suck in one deep breath after another, again.
(Bail! Bail! Use your stupid hat! I know the raft's inflated, but it's filling up... Oh crap, here we go again!!!)
So. When I return Dr. Neurology's call, I'll tell him I've been out of town, for a funeral. Which is technically is true (although I was only in New Brunswick), and should pique any sense of irony said doctor might have, given his apparent certainty regarding my imminent demise. And I hope that Dr. Lung will prove reachable, so he can either reactivate the prescription for the vacuum cleaner (allowing me to obtain some new, less sieve-like flexible tubing), or put me through yet another set of sleep studies. To prove that I need oxygen at night, not electricity at all times. Anything to keep those scalpels firmly embedded in that slab of liver, or whatever, and not in my sternum.
(Wow -- look! We're beaching right here, by the cars! It's a miracle! How did this happen? Help me pull the raft a little further out of the water. Did you bring dry clothes? God, I'm freezing)
(The guide? Oh, he'll be okay. He's done this tons of times before. Besides, that's what he gets paid for...)
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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