SCA Manufactures Fear

Fear multiplies now, and I swear it didn't use to.  Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) is scary for everyone. I mean shit - it kills you in an instant and then if you are in the lucky 2%, you get to come back from the dead- so yes, it's scary.  And for most of us, SCA comes out of nowhere; we had no warning, no diagnosis, nothing - just zap.   A startling kind of fear.

I have a pretty longstanding attitude of not being a fan of letting fear win (though sometimes it certainly does).  That almost pugnacious or competitive attitude carried me through many post-SCA adjustments and situations. After the SCA, there was sharp, piercing, breathtaking fear for so many 'first times'.  Fear the first time riding a bike fast again - done.  Check.  Swimming alone in the ocean again - check.  Sex - check.  Heart-pumping exercise - check.  The list is long, but I had thought it was finite.  Click through them one by one and I will get to the end.  Nope.

Now comes a new one.  I had unrelated surgery last week, surgery that required general anesthesia.  In the middle of the night before, I suddenly woke up - oh crap, what about Skippy, the implanted defibrillator?  What if I'm under anesthesia and my heart stops or stutters and Skippy fires off a megajolt while the MD and his scalpel are millimeters away from an important body part?  (as opposed to some unimportant body part.).  I could not believe that I, the planner, hadn't thought about that. I had updated the will (seriously), done all the laundry (seriously), prepared food to last through some sort of invasion or apocalypse, I had asked all the prudent questions about recovery, etc.  Yet somehow I had missed the BIG one until the middle of this night.  There it was again - that cold, icy fear.  New one.  SCA spawned a new one.

(It turns out what they do is place a magnet over Skippy to disable it while you are under. After all, the big bad defibrillators are right there in case something goes wrong.  It seems almost funny to say - it's nothing to worry about, nothing to fear.  Almost comical.)

But new fears continue to come from nowhere; I think they may never end.
SCA manufactures fear.   One more down.  Check.  God love magnets.