Thump

Beat, beat, beat, beat…pause….THUMP, beat, beat, beat, beat…pause…THUMP!

I sighed. Two years ago my first bout of heart palpitations started. The noticeable pause, followed by the dreaded thump that felt as if I was standing in an elevator that decided to drop ten floors in an instant.

I went to the doctor, of course. Out of all my organs, I gathered my heart had to be fairly up there on the “top organs you need to live” list. My general practitioner, a young, caring woman who listened to my heart and read the concern on my face, sent me off for an EKG.

The months that followed were uneventful. I continued to work, dealing with the thumps and ensuing dizziness, hoping that a change in diet and supplements might make them vanish.

And then, for nearly ten months, I barely felt them at all. Maybe one per day. I felt as though a lack of iron in my previous diet, accompanied by a touch of stress were the main actors in this story, and I was happy I had figured out the root cause. Feeling confident, I went back to exercising everyday and intermittent fasting.

This past December, on a lovely Saturday that included plans with friends, they came back. Only it wasn’t the hundred or so a day I was dealing with before. Now, for whatever reason, I was feeling one to two per minute. I grabbed my iron pills. I cut out alcohol. I meditated. I went to a naturopath. I went to an acupuncturist. I spent hours scrolling through medical articles, trying to see if there was something else I could be doing to quell these extra beats.

The thing is, if you’ve been checked out by a cardiologist and are given the a-okay, these extra beats aren’t dangerous. Sure, they’re incredibly unnerving, life interrupting, and can make you feel as though all you can do is lie very still in bed, but they’re not dangerous unless they consist of more than 10% of your heartbeats. Even with my new uptick in quantity, I wasn’t anywhere close to the dangerous category.

Why am I detailing my annoying medical issue in this phone blog? Because all I want to do when my heart decides to perform a one-man tango is reach for my phone. Or a drink. Or literally anything to distract myself from feeling what’s going on inside of me. I want to become so engulfed in whatever celebrity feud is happening this week that I don’t allow my mind to process the constant thumps that make me feel as though I’m on a never ending roller-coaster.

More than once this week Husband has looked over at me on the couch, covered in a blanket and holding my emotional support screen six inches from my face. “I have bad palps right now”, I say, as though using my phone to escape reality isn’t the exact reason I sought to banish it to its Faraday bag in the first place.

While I was now using my phone to escape the discomfort and stress of heart palpitations, it was no different than using it to escape boredom. I had chosen another emotion I didn’t want to feel and attempted to shut off the part of my brain that processes these emotions with online videos of puppies and makeup tutorials. (These are separate videos, the puppies were not getting their eyebrows laminated.)

Now, on this holiday Monday, as I lay here in bed typing away on this laptop with a decision to make - I can either have a repeat of yesterday, glued to my phone and filled with self-pity, or I can decide to go experience whatever the frigid outdoors has to offer me. I admit, bundling up to head out into a windchill that feels like -43 celsius is a bit daunting right now, but no more daunting than losing an entire day of living. 

I suppose I’ve just talked myself into feeling it all.