A Heart Story

From 15th August 2024

Audio here:

It’s a Thursday in mid-August, and I’m writing this three days after what I’m going to tell you about happened.

And I’d like to say I’m getting used to how my life was changed on Monday but I’m not really, not yet. Instead I’d describe this week as a slow shock. From the collapsing incident I had itself, early that morning, to recognising my new fragility, gradually and since. The magnitude of this second collapse being that what happened because of my heart in January of 2023 can no longer be called an isolated “one-off” of an incident. Since there’s no such thing as a “two-off” is there?¹

Meaning I’m in a place I’d been told I might get to someday, but hoped I’d yet avoid, somehow. This strangest of places where I find myself almost wishing for heart surgery. Hoping for a new valve to replace the one that’s knocked me over twice now

Because Monday’s incident was in its way much more frightening than the waking from sleep first collapse of early last year. This time I was awake, knew my consciousness was leaving me, and realised I could do absolutely nothing about it. Staying calm, steadily and deeply breathing, like I did, as well as trying to get carefully down from the stool I was on before I fell down, well none of that had any effect. I still went over, like a little death. And though I only cut my forehead and bruised my thigh this time, unlike all the bone breakages of last year, when I came to on Monday, sweating and frightened on the floor, I felt much more broken. Broken-hearted really, and not like a metaphor.

So now I’m looking forward. Looking forward to this coming Tuesday’s heart scan, then the month later’s appointment with my cardiology doctor, when we’ll begin talking about surgery. Knowing I’ll be fragile, and that I can’t quite trust my heart ‘til that can happen.

Walking into town

And now, Thursday morning three days later what’s it to be? Another quiet and careful one of reading and not much else, like the last three? Or no, I’ll walk. Only into town, and especially as it looks like being a windy and a raining day, I’ll enjoy that. The wind in my hair, the rain on my face and the ground beneath my good and favourite walking boots. Then once I get to town? I’ll find somewhere to sit and read for a while. Then, wanting nothing from the shops, I’ll probably get the bus home again, rather than walk back as well, like I’d usually do. That can be my managing of the fragile for now, the not walking both ways, these three days later

From six months afterwards

Despite all that from last August I’m happy to say that as of now, early in the following year, I’m holding steady. Still being regularly tested and monitored but with no surgery yet. Because as it’s turned out, the testing since last summer’s fragile time has shown that my aortic valve hasn’t got quite narrow enough, at least not yet, to be accepted for surgery. My own cardiologist is still certain surgery will eventually be needed, and agrees with me that it would make a certain sense to do it now, while I’m otherwise fit, well and what he gratifyingly calls “still young.” But the NHS gatekeeping rules say not yet. So I’m holding steady, being careful, still getting very tired some days but not, since the bad weeks of last August, feeling anything like as fragile as then.

Long may steady last, as it might have to.

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1. For new Quiet readers, I had what’s now the first of these incidents 18 months ago. Eventually diagnosed as being caused by a malfunctioning aortic valve, the part of the heart that opens up to pump new blood out through the body. “It’s simply mechanical” my NHS cardiologist told me at a regular check-up, “and one day the part will need taking out and replacing.” That day, I’m hoping, is now approaching.