by Caitlin Paredes

Stress

Laying on the cardiologists table was something that was not new for me. I knew all too well the turquoise blue plastic table. The kind of table that makes you feel so detached from everything around you. In each room was a different child’s theme. I was a 17-year-old, lying down in a Winnie the Pooh room. When I was younger, this would have been my comfort, but as a young woman I felt even more uncomfortable with where I was. I knew the doctor could sense that I was over the childish aesthetic of the room and just kept cracking jokes as she placed her cold hands and those cold electrodes all over my body.

My cardiologist was, in my educated opinion, around 100 years old and four feet tall. She had on pants up to her neck and rings that were about the size of the curlers I imagined she used at night. Her hands were mostly wrinkles and liver spots. I also do not actually remember, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she had on oversized Harry Potter glasses as well. My cardiologist was a cartoon character made into a real life person.

She looked over my ECG and sat down in a chair near the door. It’s as though she sat there to block my only exit, the only exit I wanted to take at that moment. Not that her tiny frail arms could really stop me, but maybe she banked on the idea that I could barely run a mile anymore.

Her legs crossed one over the other, her hands placed gently together on her lap. Her wrinkles at the top of one hand touching the palm of the other, a seemingly gentle gesture.

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your heart that we didn’t already know about.”

At about 9 years old I had been diagnosed with a heart murmur, which soon cleared itself up. However, I was also told I had mitral valve prolapse. This is a typical condition where the valve on the left side of your heart, arguably the most crucial side of your heart, lets blood go in the direction it is not meant. Mitral valve prolapse is actually incredibly common, often symptomless. But what they don’t tell you is that some people have symptoms, and one of those people is me. The symptoms for me include sudden chest pain, a racing heart, shortness of breath, and dizziness. This is mostly during strenuous exercise, but it can act up randomly as well.

The room was a blur around me. No, not due to dizziness, due to my incredible ability to zone out in any situation. I have the attention span of a goldfish. Suddenly I was snapped back into attention by a conversation my mother and the cardiologist were having. The cardiologist seemed to be questioning my mother about her job. Not much of an explanation needed there, unemployed for the past few years due to her plethora of medical reasons. Suddenly the conversation seemed to switch over to me and my life.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“Five brothers.”

“Oh wow! Only girl?” She obviously wasn’t looking for an answer, no one ever is with this question. “That’s a lot of brothers! How are they?”

“Ok.” I couldn’t understand why she was questioning me about my life. This is a medical visit, was all I could think. I did not want to waste my time when I was looking for answers as to why I could barely run anymore. I was always a great cross country runner, excelling in my sport, and running a minimum of five miles a day. At this time, I was progressing backwards. Suddenly I went from running these five miles at a fast pace, to running a mile with chest pain. The pain was radiating from my chest to below my left breast.

“Are you happy?”

Honestly, this was not something I was thinking about in the past few months. I was under incredible stress and I was crying just about every night. I had so many applications and scholarships to submit. I was taking care of one of my brothers, taking him to and from school, as my mother has always been severely sick. Due to her sickness, my family was under immense pressure. One of my other little brothers was being bullied at school for his mental disabilities to the point of a kids crawling into his bathroom stall and punching him. My youngest brother was in the middle of trying to find out why he was so sick lately, the biggest idea being that he had leukemia. My uncle had just been in a motorcycle accident and had to amputate his leg or else he would not survive. I had just had my first heartbreak. I was not running well.

I had become a pencil. It was as if I was using the pencil furiously and pushing down too hard on the paper. My pencil had become dull. It could still write, but not in the same sharp manner as before. I had become numb to the world around me. I was not necessarily sad, but I also was not happy. I felt almost nothing. I did not respond to her question.

Difficult

To be honest, I am still unsure to as to why my cardiologist referred me to a therapist. I did not tell her anything that would have stood out as someone who needed help. I only did not answer her one question; I had gotten every other question right. I told her exactly what I knew she wanted to hear. I will chalk it up to a motherly intuition.

I have never been one to look for help from others or tell them how I am feeling if it is at all negative. I attribute this to my Irish roots. As comedian John Mulaney once said, “The plan with Irish people is like, ‘I’ll keep all my emotions right here, and then one day, I’ll die.’” This is how my family has always been. My grandfather actually passed away because he was having such intense stomach pains and not telling anyone; He died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. My father one time called me from the hospital asking me to pick him up. He had been in the hospital for a week and I had no idea.

I definitely was not one of the easiest children this women had sit across from her. Sigmund-Freud, as she will so comically be called, was a woman in her forties with no memorable attributes, and consequently my therapist for the hour. I was told to choose any seat I wished, and my only options were fluffy couches where you sink when you sit. I would not let this protective padding trick me into anything. She handed me a box of tissues and sat down again with her pad and pencil in her hand. That is what made me so mad, she was going to write down my life on a sketch pad. My life was not something that was as easy as a few words or sentences on a pad, and yet she sat there thinking she could fix me. She told me,“We do not have to talk until you want to.” So we sat there together, in silence.

I looked around the room and observed a room that would have made any movie director proud. A dimly light room with a brown aura. A big brown mahogany office desk lurked behind Sigmund-Freud, with her many degrees lining the wall. Little model brains illuminated the idea, for me, that this is not where I was suppose to be. I was concerned with my heart, not my brain.

“Well, If we do not talk, your mother will be spending her money on something that did not matter.”

I already knew that this was wasting her money. I allowed Sigmund-Freud to ask me her cookie-cutter questions to learn more about pathetic child’s lives. She asked me question after question and I was honest, but very monotone and straight-faced.

“Wow, you’ve got a lot on your plate.”

She pompously sat there and thought she knew so much about me and my situation from the ten minutes we talked to each other. I hadn’t even told her the most of it. Sigmund-Freud had no idea who I was or why I was there with her. When my time was up, I threw those unused tissues onto the couch and walked out.

Resolve?

For a year, I did not get better. Even with my lack of ability, I did not return back to my cardiologist. The trust was just not there. I even had a scheduled appointment with her, to check in, and I called and cancelled it. Eventually, when I went into my first year of college, that pain went away and I was able to start my training again. I always feared my ability of a runner, and I did not even join the cross country team in a fear that I would be in pain again, or not live up to my all.

Sitting in my boring Exercise Evaluation and Prescription class, none of the information really ever jumps off the page to me. I was scrolling through my phone, just through the apps. Basically, trying to find something to look at except  for the symptoms of cardiovascular disease information being presented to me.

I do not care too much about finance, but I wondered what the stocks looked like that day. The stock market was rising, as always, unlike my attention span in that class. My eyes darted to the professor who was about to look this way. I did not want to seem rude, so I locked my phone and tucked it under my leg. I kept snoozing when presented with cardiac rehabilitation program criteria.

“Notice that if you have clinical depression you cannot be considered for this type of cardiac rehabilitation program.”

The least invasive program, the program where you work out on your own. If you have depression, you cannot work out without supervision if you are a heart attack survivor. I finally understood it all. My professor did not realize he was saying something anyone actually cared about. Speaking about my secret outloud to everyone to hear.

I could not run because I was not happy.

There really is no amount of time to put everything in your life into perspective. Like most things, a thought is not black and white, and neither is a feeling. My cardiologist could have been attempting to help me emotionally. However, there was no understanding that she gave me. She needed to have given me an idea as to what she was attempting to do to me, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that may have been for her. I do not blame her. She was wise in her age and this new way of being a doctor is beyond her time. I only hope that physicians in the future will attempt to explain their actions to their patients, so that they feel comfort and understanding in the situation in which they have been placed.

For the therapist, I feel pity for her. I think she wanted to be this perfect mold of her job description. However, the people who step into her office everyday are not perfect. Perfect is just a word and not a truth. Her care was not perfect and I would have never expected it to be. It was too far from perfect, an exact opposition to everything that she had worked for so steadfastly.

There is not much that I can do about the past; All I can do is hold a sharpener in my hand, trying to keep my life unblunted for the furious notes I must take.  I do not doubt that this sort of pain and tragedy will cause the same issues in my life again. The manifestation of bad thoughts spreading into my heart like a disease.