Day: October 8, 2007

Life marches on despite my personal emotional crises. The children need to go to school and to be fed, and to be made to do homework, and to be put to bed. There are necessary business tasks. Laundry happens. None of this goes away because I choose today to have an emotional crisis. It merely piles up if my crisis causes me to neglect it. Fortunately having stuff to do keeps me from spinning in mental circles, so that is good.

I had my fourth session teaching the creative writing class today. It continues to go variously. The early class continues to be loud and chaotic, but each of the kids there has produced multiple stories. They sizzle with energy and some of it lands on the page. Derailment Boy continues to be a major distraction. He doesn’t really want to be there. Today I found out that his dad is currently dating the mom of one of the giggle girls. This explains much of his behavior. I can see the conflicts raging inside him. And in her too. Neither of them is particularly happy about the prospect of the other as a step sibling. Not only that but the talked about how their parents are going to abandon them to the care of relatives and go on a cruise together. Apparently I’m hosting a soap opera as well as a writing class. But addressing the issues by talking about them a little helped Derailment Boy calm down some.

I’m having a harder time pulling stories out of the afternoon class. I get them excited and creative and they start to write. They’re so excited that they take the stories home to work on them. I then never see the stories again. They vanish never to return. I need to send a note to parents pleading that they help the stories get finished and sent back. I need to have finished stories to include in the book.

Last night we got to have dinner with some long time friends. They’ve lived 20 minutes away from us for a decade, but somehow we fell out of touch. I’m glad that they made the effort to contact us and to host us for dinner. It was really fun. We’ll need to do it again soon because we’ve barely scratched the surface on getting reacquainted. Also they have pet chickens and my kids think that is the coolest thing ever. Gleek in particular loved picking up the chickens and carrying them around. These were really nice chickens. They would just let the kids walk over and pick them up. That is completely unlike all my prior experiences with chickens, which all involved pecking and flapping.

Now if only my kids would go to sleep so Howard and I could have our together time.

You aren’t supposed to notice your heartbeat. It is the fundamental rhythm of your life. When that steady beat comes to your attention, it is only because something has gone awry. Sometimes that “awry” is joyful, like the sudden jump in heart rate when that one special person notices you. Other times the “awry” is terrified, as in the thumping heart and adrenaline surge of a vehicular accident.

For the past month my heartbeat has occupied a significant portion of my attention. This is because it has begun, for no apparent reason, to trip over itself. I’ll be sitting at my computer and suddenly Thump THUMP with a succession of smaller beats as it finds a rhythm again. This has been worrisome, although the word “worrisome” completely understates the gamut of fear, hope, and denial I’ve felt over the past month. I hoped it was stress and would therefore go away. I hoped it was a thyroid imbalance and therefore easily fixable. I hoped many things. Mostly I hoped that it wasn’t a real sensation, that I was somehow making it up. The world is a very strange place when you spend time hoping you have a psychosomatic illness.

I’m not completely stupid. I’ve been to two different doctors over this. One did an EKG which was completely normal. The other did a thyroid test that was completely normal. The next step is to wear a heart monitor for a 24 hour period and hope to catch one of the thump events on tape. I’ve had the prescription for that sitting on my fridge for almost two weeks while I tried to pretend that I didn’t need to do it. In order for me to spend over $300 and 24 hours wired to a device, I have to admit that I believe there is something wrong. I twisted and turned a lot trying to not face it. This morning I finally called to schedule the heart monitor.

Because something is wrong.

And I don’t know what it is.

And that terrifies me.

I would be a lot more complacent right now if I could believe in the omniscience of doctors. But I’ve been through a medical ringer before and I remember how much of what they do is based on guess work. That’s probably when I figured out that my doctor is no smarter than I am. He just has a different education and experience set. This means that for ordinary illnesses I hardly need him at all. I can figure it out by myself. In fact I’m often better off managing things by myself because viruses don’t get better more quickly for having spent a $20 copay to identify them as viruses.

At the beginning of this thing I spent a lot of time with Dr. Google. That was where I learned that what I have are “palpitations.” I also learned that the shakiness and anxiety that accompany them are common. I’ve observed symptoms closely, trying to collect enough data to figure this thing out by myself. Stress, lack of sleep, and caffeine make the palpitations worse, exercise does not. Pretty much every source ended with telling me I should go see a doctor, but then so do the entries on sore throats.

I’m done trying to research and guess. I’m done hoping it will just go away. Tomorrow morning I go get wired.