Take it to Heart

Well, now the cardiologist knows what my heart is doing, but we don't know why yet.

I was having so much pain in my chest, arm and neck that I had to call for an appointment. Doc increased one med and gave me nitro as well. The stress test was better than he expected---not as much plaque in the arteries as he thought there would be. So I am thinking No Ablation? maybe.

The problem is that it beating too fast and I am having way too many extra beats. My heart is a little too thick too--from all that work! lol

He told me to stop drinking green tea!

I can't believe it...all these years I thought i was doing myself a favor by drinking green tea. I can still have herbs and ginger...and can even have 2 cups of coffee, but no tea. Who would thunk it?

It is afternonn and several hours after my visit. I am still tried and still having pain, but not as burning and not as intense. My son asked how I was feeling and I told them I actually feel better even though the symptoms are not markedly decreased.

Relief comes because I have the right information.

It helps to know what is going on even if what is going on is not good;a little information goes a long way...and the validation that what I am feeling is not all "in my head" is a great pain-reducer. Now I know what to do, and I know what to expect and when to call for help.

Information leads to awareness, awareness leads to insight and insight can change behavior.

I want to live. I have three grandchildren and will have more no doubt and I want to be here to read to them and write songs and knit hats and crochet goats...

I also have a new internist who is determined to look at the whole picture to--to see me as a whole person so that she can really help me. So I am blessed.

Before Lupus If anyone had told me that I was going to have heart trouble, high blood pressure, migraines, deteriorating bones, internal bleeding, and so many other little problems  I would have scoffed and cartwheeled away.

...ok, maybe no cartwheel, but I would have tilted my axis with a zippy sir-shah-sa-na pose and said, "No way. I am too healthy and I do yoga and meditate and eat all the right stuff. I can't get sick."

And yet, here I am. Still and quiet with today's news:

It's not like I was not trying to get well before, because I did. But my fight was a frantic one, a frantic turning on tiptoe one way or another to this doctor or that doctor and never really taking what they said to heart. I did follow orders, I was very compliant. But the battle was an outside thing; my body felt more like a vehicle that wasn't working right and the doctors were like mechanics who knoew more or less how to fix one failed part or another.

this is different.

I am calm in my heart; I have taken this news to heart.

The battle is won. No, the battle is one.

I am am greater than the sum of my parts and from this quiet place inside where I am  listening to my body's pain the way a mother would listen to her baby I know that things are going to be different from now on. 

I don't know why, but  this part of the illness has changed me. It feels like my body is a room (the picture I get in my head is of a little chapel I used to go to on my lunch breaks when I worked at our little hospital--within the tiny chapel was an alcove with an altar and kneeler...the alcove had a skylight that made the alcove look like you could step up into heaven) ---so my body is like that little chapel and my heart is like the alcove.

I know I am going to be well again. I just didn't know getting well would be so quiet and peaceful.