LCFC #3: A scarred heart beats to its own rhythm
Plus: Pop culture connections with Bonnie Raitt and 'Shrinking'
Ceiling tile. Ceiling tile. Ceiling tile.
One after another, the drab squares passed above me.
What’s happening?
Mind fuzzy, I shook my head.
“Sweetie, please lie still,” a woman’s voice said from behind my right ear as I was rolled along on a bed, lying on my back. “Remember the incision in your leg. We don’t want it to bleed.”
Incision in my leg . . . Thinking seemed laborious. Finally, brain cell circuits started to fire.
“Right,” I mumbled and stopped wiggling.
I’d just spent several hours under anesthesia on a narrow table. A doctor had made a small nick on the right side of my groin and inserted a thin, flexible tube into one of the main arteries, the femoral artery. He’d snaked the small tube up into the aorta, a candy cane-shaped superhighway carrying blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Gliding upward, the catheter arced around the aorta’s candy cane curve into the upper, and then lower, right chamber of the heart.
With electrodes fed through the catheter and attached to the right ventricle, the doctor could test how well the electrical signal traveled through that heart chamber. He was watching to see if any cells there didn’t follow the signals of the sinus node — the maestro that maintains a steady heartbeat. He was also able to send electrical current into cells to see how easily they swayed from the heart’s regular rhythm.
Abnormal rhythms could arise if healthy, pink muscle cells had turned to fatty, gray scar cells — something that sometimes happens in people who exercise a lot, if they have very specific changes to their DNA. Those abnormal rhythms also happened when the electrodes hit certain spots in the right ventricle. The chamber would beat fast, spiking my heart rate, causing it to beat at 140 to 190 times per minute, as if I were running a marathon or sprinting across the swimming pool while lying completely still. What was troublesome about these fast, off-rhythm beats is that they don’t allow for that lower chamber to contract quite like it should, meaning blood doesn’t reach the lungs to be re-infused with oxygen.
Touching the electrodes to my heart, the doctor easily induced repeated rounds of abnormal rhythms, or arrhythmias. Those arrhythmias meant I’d need my own internal shocking device, an ICD, or implantable cardioverter defibrillator. It’s like the device, an AED, used to revive Damar Hamlin on the football field in early January or the buzzing paddles used in TV shows, where someone yells “CLEAR” and you see a person’s chest rise and fall and you either get the beep, beep, beep of life or beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, flat line.
An ICD is a bit more sporty. It is about the size of two half dollars, so you carry it with you always, in your body. The doctor had slipped mine under my left pec muscle and fed the ICD’s wire through a vein below my collarbone through the top right heart chamber to the bottom chamber. When abnormal arrhythmias arose as the catheter electrodes touched my heart, the ICD shocked the right ventricle, putting it back to the beat set by the sinus node. It was like a slap to the wrist for bad behavior (though it wouldn’t feel that way when I first felt the ICD zap my heart years later).
The memory of what the doctor told me would happen was slowly buzzing through my brain cells as the anesthesia wore off. I recalled how amazing I thought it was that a doctor could feed a wire from your leg to your heart to check it out, to make sure it was ok, that nothing was really wrong. That’s what my doctor was doing, right?
Not knowing what had happened in the hours before, I latched onto that science and assured myself everything would be fine.
“She had some pretty scary arrhythmias,” I overheard the doctor telling my dad. He’d brought me to the hospital early in the morning, before 7 a.m. It was long past lunchtime, and he’d waited hours for news. She definitely needs the defibrillator, I think I recall the doctor saying. She’s going to be ok, probably sore, ready to go home in a day or two. He told my dad a few more things, then left.
Pretty scary arrhythmias.
If I had compartmentalized information earlier, willing my mind to focus only on the science, (possibly as a form of denial), I couldn’t do it now. The primitive, self-interested part of my brain took over. The catheter had been in my artery. My aorta. My heart. My heart had scary rhythms. My heart was scarred.
My heart was broken.
All of a sudden a vice seemed to turn tighter and tighter on my chest and back.
“Dad, it hurts,” I whined.
Now, pop culture, specifically the Grammys and the new TV show Shrinking.
It was your son’s heart that saved me
And a life you gave us both
Those two lines from Bonnie Raitt’s Just Like That are the spark. Even typing them evokes that tightness in my throat and tears at my eyelids, an awakening of emotion that is so wholly human, yet typically frowned upon in society.
The first time the flood of feelings came was after reading this tweet:
I was 1 of the 143. And, for whatever reason, the numbers were more of a reminder that I’d had a heart transplant than the scars on my chest or the achiness of my breastbone growing back together.
Maybe I could sideline the pain but not the statistics.
When I tracked down Bonnie Raitt’s song, curious why it won the 2023 Grammy Award for Song of the Year, and listened to it, the flood of feelings came back, with a vengeance. Tears streamed down my cheeks when Raitt sang about a mother, her son, a man who got his heart and the gift of life the mother gave, twice.
I was the recipient of such a gift. And I feel guilt and shame when I start to forget or when I get overwhelmed as I integrate back into the daily grind. When that happens, I turn on Just Like That and let myself feel. It’s my sad song therapy, the 15 minutes when you listen to a song and let go, a technique touted on Shrinking, a new Apple TV+ show.
The rollercoaster of emotions usually slows as Raitt sings:
I lay my head upon his chest
And I was with my boy again
I dream of that moment with my donor’s mother. The question is, does she?