My New Heart

Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) changes everything.    At first, in my I-love-denial way, I  insisted that the SCA had little impact on my life.  In retrospect, clearly insane.    People like me have SCA when their risk of developing heart disease in the next 10 years hovers at 1% (Framingham).     But you wake up one day and some doctor is telling you that your heart had stopped, three shocks with the paddles, and it could happen again (or not).   Oh yeah, by the way, we are putting a defibrillator into your chest wall with wires into your heart.   Your actual heart.   And I am to see myself as lucky.  

 But me – I decide that nothing had really changed.  I may be brave, but I am nuts. 

It changes everything;  bit by bit, you examine everything.    And as we wind through that slow gentle upheaval,  we tell ourselves the truth about things we have long avoided.  Or perhaps it’s the lifting of clouds, fog and veil.   And I had grown very comfortable with my  fog and veil when it came to relationships.  I didn’t want to see what I could have seen.    I had adopted a persona and self-image I could live with.  Now, it’s a new heart and it’s a new life and that comfort slides away bit by bit.   There is discomfort, there is excitement, there is fear, there’s a sense the planet went wobbly --- but there is a certainty and a peace.  An uneasy peace, but peace nonetheless.  I won’t settle for what I had settled for; I won’t repeat what I had already repeated.   

Every relationship in my life is now different; some slightly and some enormously.  What I will look for, what I give, what I will accept, what I seek  – all different.  And I have come to terms with some of the nasty, sharp, jagged truths about my past choices.  I am guilty of what I blamed others for – they are, after all,  what I chose.   I chose those with whom I did not have to risk the most terrifying of all our states - intimacy. They were incapable of it; I was off the hook.

No more.  Not with this new heart.  I may be nuts, but I am brave.   I will have what I should have.  Me and my new heart.