The Subtle Proves Significant

Posted on September 8, 2004 in Coronary

On Saturday, I felt pain all over my body and developed a wheeze which I cured by inhaling a couple of shots of Ventolin. The aches popped up in my shoulders, my necks, and my chest — nothing sustained itself long enough to send me to the emergency room. I developed a headache late in the day and I wondered, like a Christian Fundamentalist, whether these wracks and stretches of my tissues were signs of the End.

Whether they stem from my asthma, my angina, or my anxiety, however, these smartings must be considered and their causes found. Some of them — the wicked streams of sharpened nerves that run from my shoulders to my wrists — turn out to be nothing more than an over-extended muscle. The deepest, most transient, and therefore most trivial of all has turned out to be the most significant.

What brought me to the cardiologist was a slight twinge in my lower ribcage after an early treadmill test. I thought myself quite a baby for reporting it, but I wanted to know what caused the lightheadedness I felt whenever I surmounted a hill crest. The internist told me not to go on any trails in Whiting where I might not be found for hours. I must confess that I resented the prescription. It took me from the gouges and the slopes that I loved; removed me from the greasewood and the buckwheat and limited me to the concrete and the asphalt. I kept asking myself about that brief throb: Was it a lie I told myself for the attention? Through this summer, as I waited for my stress echo test, I tapped my foot, expecting this routine of checking the heart to be nothing more than one more item to be checked off a list.

Friday proved me wrong. I was surprised when, after pushing myself harder on the treadmill than the average patient Dr. Ipp sees, after seeing the normal EKG, after hearing that my blood pressure was very good — to hear that one of the valves in my heart curled its lip as the blood flowed through. These “minor” aches about my sternum proved more real and less psychosomatic than I thought. There weren’t just extramuscular: their origins lay in a narrowing or blockage of one of the arteries that feed the heart.

I have a new view about pain in my life. Pain is not just an incovenience to be checked with a Tylenol. You have to talk to it, scout out the burn. The dialogue cannot be just a poetic one, not mere personification of the wordless mystery. There’s a code in pain that cannot always be read directly as one reads a scrape on the knee or a cut on the hand. You need to use the technology of the age — the blood pressure cuffs, the blood tests, the ultrasound equipment, the EKGs, and the X-Rays — to hear all of its voice. And you need the wisdom and experience of those trained in the interpretation of these scripts to help you make sense of it and, perhaps, save your life.

What I feel isn’t shame, traumatic memory, or the struggle of my soul against the world. It is plaque in a vessel, a dam blocking the river, tamarisk choking the course, a plastic bag held over the mouth and nose of the heart. I must take steps to stop this burking of my body from within. I must act to save my life.