Column: Notes from Home

An angry hamster, that’s what it felt like. When people asked, that’s what I told them. An angry hamster playing wild jazz rhythms inside my chest. Oh, and lightheadedness, most of the time, and dizziness and nausea, some of the time. I panted after climbing steps, unless I walked really, really slowly.

Truth be told, I felt elderly, fragile, like the family member left behind on a bench, waving at others as they rode rides at the county fair or at home when they went to see films where things jump at you or explosions are characters. The kind of movies worth watching in movie theaters.

It was 10 years ago when I first got the diagnosis: arrhythmia. An irregular heartbeat. Then it became atrial fibrillation: the angry hamster jamming with its instrument. The heart muscles didn’t do their syncopated dance all the time, but they were irregular often enough, for long enough, that I was visiting the emergency room at least once a year. Then it became twice within 10 months. Then it was irregular all the time for over a month, even with medication and after a cardioversion — an electric shock treatment (not an experience I recommend).

What were the options? Do nothing and learn to live with those syncopated rhythms. Medicate my heart back into compliance, and learn to live with potentially toxic medications as they got absorbed into my body’s tissues … until they stopped working and were replaced with a different, more toxic chemical bath.

Or allow a team of cardiac specialists to run catheters with wires up into my heart.

I chose that last option, called a catheter ablation. They used electricity and radio waves to create a pattern of scars within my heart muscles. The tiny electric signals that cause the syncopated rhythms can’t travel through scar tissue. Recent research has shown that it’s an effective way to end the irregularities, to turn hearts from chaotic jazz drum sets to organs with a more stable, melodic rhythm.

As news of my pending treatment at Mayo circulated — that’s the result of putting your name on the prayer list at church and making arrangements to be absent from work — people who’d had similar procedures sought me out, telling me the tales of their own syncopated organs and how much better they felt now. That was reassuring, but it didn’t still every anxiety. There’s something very disturbing when a doctor talks about “death” as a possible outcome of both doing nothing and the different treatment options. It was a statistically unlikely chance in the case of the procedure I was undergoing, but still very real. Very permanent.

The day of the ablation is still a bit foggy for me. I remember arriving at the hospital (at 5 a.m.) and going up to my room. I remember the humiliation of nakedness and being shaved (back, chest and … other places), the discomfort of needles and bright lights, the worried faces of wife and daughter, left behind in my room as they wheeled me away. Then I drifted into unconsciousness — more than 10 hours of that day are completely gone — until I returned to the world of sound, light and pain as they moved me from gurney to bed back in my hospital room. Recovery had begun.

What did that mean? At first it meant more humiliations when it came to privacy of space and body, vulnerability and dependency on others when it came to basics like eating, washing my hands, even going to the bathroom. It meant the bitter aftertaste of “medicine” from my IV, and peeling off the sticky patches (along with hair and skin) that held the heart monitor and other nefarious “sensors” in place.

And even though the procedure was already at least a partial success — I did wake up from the procedure and my heart, though beating fast, no longer housed that angry hamster — I experienced for a while the fear and trembling, the nausea that comes with the awareness of mortality.

I am feeling much better now; the angry hamster has left the building. But those memories will be with me for a long time, along with the things I learned about the paradox of our bodies: so fragile, so easily damaged, but how strong, too, how quickly a body can recover, if we are patient and recognize the differences between necessary and unnecessary risks.

Most of all, I relearned the lesson about how there is no shame in letting others help you. The lesson that we are all, always, dependent on each other.

Albert Lea resident David Rask Behling teaches at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, and lives with his wife and children in Albert Lea. His column appears every other Tuesday.