A Heart Story

Three Days Later

Listen or read, like always.

It’s Thursday now, as I’m writing this. Three days since 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 last year can no longer be called an isolated “one-off” of an incident. Since there’s no such thing as a “two-off,” fragile is the way I am now.¹

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

Because Monday, thinking back to it, was in its way much more horrible 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 be talking about surgery. Knowing I’ll be fragile, and that I can’t trust my heart anymore ‘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. And probably, wanting nothing from the shops, I’ll just 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.

So I walked in, I have to. Especially now.

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.