Heart to Heart

It’s kind of odd to press your hand against your side and feel your heart beating in your chest. I knew other people had hearts; I always assumed that I did too, but it still came as a slight surprise to feel a little thing thumping away in there.

I never really thought about my heart until it started beating out of rhythm. It first happened in high school. I was about to go to sleep when my heart started thumping harder than I’d ever felt it before, speeding up, then suddenly slowing. This irregular patter put me a little on edge, which only made my heart beat faster and exacerbated the issue. My doctor told me it was PVC, premature ventricular contractions. I found it ironic that a defect of the body’s natural piping system would share an acronym with one of the most widespread manmade piping materials, but I decided not to comment on it. Basically the heart adds an extra beat that’s more forceful than normal. Mayo Clinic claims it happens in most people at some point, and assures otherwise healthy readers not to grow concerned. That’s nice to hear but hard to believe when it feels like you’re about to enter cardiac arrest.

My doctor also told me that PVCs are brought on by stress, but I’m not sure if I believe that. The first time I felt one I had just figured out what to write for an important essay, though I still had a few major exams. It wasn’t like I was reclining on a pool chair with a banana smoothie and a stack of Tintin comics, but it wasn’t that stressful. The subsequent times I felt PVCs were similar: stressful, but not too stressful. I might have felt it at some point last term when I took Physiology and we studied the circulatory system. I did suddenly become self-conscious of my breath rate when we talked about respiration, and renal excretion did make me want to pee. In a way, those moments were just as unsettling. It’s easy to think of yourself as this singular soul rather than just a complicated machine subject to the physical laws of the universe, one that can break with a simple malfunction. Sure, your back might ache some times, and when you get cut you bleed, but personally I’ve only really identified with what I can see when I look in a mirror. Although even when looking at bare skin, I guess it’s what’s underneath that matters.

Dissections are even worse. Actually I really enjoy dissections (not worms), but at a certain point when sawing through a rat’s sternum with a razor blade you have to ask yourself whether someone else would see something similar if they decided to take YOU apart. Underneath the surface are the same goopy organs, suspended in the same muscles and bone. I remember when I took apart that rat, I snipped the major arteries and veins and plucked out its heart with a pair of tweezers. It was the size of my thumb’s fingernail, plump and reddish-violet. For a split second I considered popping it into my mouth and swallowing. Fortunately, the smell of formaldehyde is a powerful deterrent.

I stared at the heart and thought about how it had been working not long ago. Had the rat even been aware of it in there? Maybe the rat felt it beating harder with fear…possibly right before it got euthanized. That wasn’t a pleasant thought. I put down the heart and kept looking.

That’s sort of how it works isn’t it? You think about all the effort your body makes to keep you alive, marvel that it all manages to work without you telling it to, and then you forget about it five minutes later when the fajitas hit the lunch line. It’s only in the moments when you’re at your weakest, when you wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare and feel your heart skipping two or three beats at once that you remember again what it means to be vulnerable.

Sometimes writing about it on a blog makes you feel better.

Sometimes not.

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