MEET BELINDA
Some things are hard to put into words. Like our bodies. How do you put your body into words? It’s the vehicle that moves you through everything you do. For fun, for work, for nothing, just being. It’s always carrying your soul around. And at the heart of that body, the literal heart, is your heart. And at the heart of your heart is a beat. Beat beat beat beat beatbeatbeatbeat all your life. You don’t have to make it happen. In fact, you can’t make it happen. You can hold your breath. You can’t hold your heartbeat. Maybe if you revisit that time you didn’t turn your ringer off at the symphony you can get it to speed up a bit. Certainly if you run to catch a plane, the work it did calls for your attention once your butt hits the seat, and you say, Oh hey friend, thanks for kicking it up a notch when I needed you. But that’s silly. Because none of you would ever think to thank it. Of course your heart beats harder when you run, what else is it going to do? It’s a heart. That’s its job.
What happens when you’re sitting on an exam table and a nurse asks you what kind of pain exactly you’re having in your heart. Atrial? Ventrical? Well I don’t know, sister, I was lucky to be able to point to my heart before I got this pacemaker a week ago. How are your ventricles feeling? How do you spell ventrickle? I’m not a doctor. I’m not a pro patient. I don’t want to be a pro patient. I’m a 47-year-old woman who was running one morning a month ago and realized that I couldn’t make it a block without losing strength and thinking I was going to pass out. Checking my stats at CVS a few hours later showed a pulse of 42. I’m not some obnoxious athlete who’s proud of my resting pulse of blahby-blah. I just run a little so I can drink more and try to not go up a size in jeans. And I did pull off a hungover 10K this March 18th. My first. And pretty proud to do it in just over an hour. But 42 doesn’t seem quite right, and I definitely don’t feel normal.
Hey doc, I don’t feel normal.
Not normal how? Well, I lost my strength kind of. The world was closing in. No, I didn’t pass out. I just felt, I don’t know. Did I say I didn’t have strength?
I know how to explain distress I’ve often felt but can’t see. I’m going to puke. I have a splitting headache. My cramps are killing me. My kidneys say it’s time for water.
I have low blood pressure? My heart is skipping beats? Then beating harder? That explains that hard thumping/flip/breathless thing? You know what, it was like going down the first hill of a roller coaster, but it didn’t stop all morning, does that help? My pulse has been soaring up and down as I sit here? Why’s that? How long has it been going on, uh, I don’t know. Um, I hiked when I drove my son home from school in Manhattan, I seemed fine. Oh, my sister had me do an Orange Theory trial class and I nearly wore out that treadmill, I was awesome. It almost made me want to join a gym, but it wasn’t that great. That was, maybe May? I hiked in July. It had already started by then, so I knew it wasn’t just the altitude.
And now it was five weeks ago today that I first heard the word “pacemaker” used to put my body into words. I’ve been spinning myself as a cyborg on social media in an attempt at optimism for two weeks now.
Do you know how many songs and common sayings use the word heart? I’m starting to know. As I’m typing this, trying to put my body into words, Regina Spektor is singing, “Then you take that love you made, and stick into some, someone else’s heart, pumping someone else’s blood.” You know who’s helping pump my blood? Belinda the Pacemaker. Brandon thought it would be good to name it. He suggested Ringo, because he keeps the beat. An Englishman didn’t feel right to me. A few days later I thought of an American woman, because We Got the Beat. When a sweet nurse walked into my room to draw blood 45 minutes before I first started carrying a computer in my chest for the rest of my life and introduced herself as Belinda, it was a done deal. Where’s my birth certificate? I’ll sign it. Belinda Cecil, I guess? Born 9/19/18, 1:30 (give or take, things got fuzzy after the guy in a blue mask and cap asked me if my tattoo is henna then injected me with something.)
Naming objects that get put into your body is not a bad idea. Celebrate that partnership. See it as a friend. Who can be mad at a machine that’s trying to bring your strength back? Or at Belinda Carlisle? Or the nurse who told me that her throat was hoarse from laughing all weekend during a family reunion in Houston?
Hey Amy, at least you live in a time when this is possible! It’s a new lease on life! Yeah, well, great. You want one too? They’re really awesome. You can be looking forward to your trip to Colorado, aware that your heart is doing some unusual stuff, then you can cancel it so you can learn how to watch for a wound that isn’t healing right and wonder if it’s supposed to hurt in your heart (which you’re now very aware is basically in the center of your chest) when you do your life.
The best part? Being the only, only person I’ve ever met who has a computer planted in my chest is no guarantee that I get to be pacemaker girl. I have plenty of opportunity to build on this. I could one day become pacemaker/breast cancer girl, or pacemaker/head injury girl, the layers are endless! I just know I’ll always have this foundation, and a heart that slowly fills with wires for the rest of my life, since the two leads—one in the top, one in the bottom—can’t be removed.
Am I whining? Oh yes yes. Am I always low about this? No. I’m stubborn, pushy and I’m going to have to admit at this stage of my life, impatient. When Brandon brought me home from the hospital, I immediately ran up and down the stairs several times to put my pacer through the paces, wanting reassurance that the lump sticking out of my chest—I’m sorry, Belinda—was a worthy addition to my life. Even I had to stop and admit that I should calm down and give my new partner a chance to settle into her new home.
So in closing, yay, medicine. I am so excited to have a computer stuck in my chest for the rest of my life. It’s not a new lease on life. My life wasn’t in imminent danger. I’m angry right now, and the feelings are swirling around like the heartbeats that I talked to a nurse about this afternoon: Stabbing pain? No, not that. More of an ache, I’d say? Like brain freeze in my chest, maybe. I’d describe it maybe as the feeling you get when the engine that’s pumped your blood since before you were born breaks down on the side of your life’s road, for reasons doctors say they’ll probably never know. It’s that. Your heart is inflamed from the wires they screwed into it, she says. Be patient, it takes time, she says. Takes time to not feel heartbeats as little painful thumps when I run up the stairs with my niece to catch a violin concert I booked tickets for two months ago, at a time when I didn’t know I’d have to choose a dress that didn’t reveal the scabby remnants of glue holding my skin together just under my collarbone.
My heart has been through a lot. Divorce—my parents and mine. Miscarriages. Layoffs. Star-crossed loves. Babies I devoted myself to, perhaps with too much of my heart, growing up and scattering to the coasts. Maybe it broke from emotional strain and doesn’t owe me an explanation after all it has carried me through.
Now Regina’s singing, “Never never mind your bleeding heart, bleeding heart.”
Never mind. Never never mind.
Belinda and I are getting to know each other. It will just take a little time. But I’m sure I’ll grow to love her, from the top and bottom of my heart.