Broken Hearted

It starts with a flutter: butterflies in my chest. Not sweet, delicate butterflies but twitchy, back-alley ones, like monarchs on meth.

If you’ve ever danced hard, hiked fast, or run far, you know the ribcage-rattling thuds I mean; they’re life-affirming when you’re deliberately exerting yourself. But they happen to me when I’m eating breakfast. Or driving my car. Or trying to fall asleep at night.

For more than 20 years, I’ve had an arrhythmia that sets my heart racing at up to 210 beats per minute for no apparent reason, at inopportune moments. On a good day, it leaves me breathless and lightheaded. On a bad, it sends me scurrying to the ER for relief.

It’s caused by a physiological misfire in my upper ventricle, and caffeine makes it worse. I’ve been drinking dumb decaf for decades. Like an infant.

I was told these episodes are “like earthquakes — you get used to them.” But I think we can all agree no one ever really gets used to earthquakes.

There is an invasive procedure that fixes it, but the sad truth is:

a) I do NOT rock a hospital gown, and

b) Heart surgery seems awfully extreme when there are other things that will quell a chest temblor.

Deep breathing and meditation don’t work; I’ve tried. What can work are freaky techniques called vagal maneuvers, likely conceived by the same witch doctors who brought us leeches and bloodletting. And I’ve done them all:

Standing on your head. Gagging yourself. Bearing down like you’re giving birth. Rubbing the inner part of your ear in a circular motion while gazing in the opposite direction. Plunging your face in a bowl of ice water. And blowing hard into a syringe before quickly lying backward with your feet elevated.

When none of these work, ER docs give you a drug called adenosine, which literally stops the heart — just for a wee moment — and is known for giving patients a feeling of “impending doom.” Fun stuff. I saw a T-shirt once that said:

Adenosine: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

When the tremors are over, I always lay depleted for hours, as if I’d run a 10k; indeed, my heart actually did. The whole situation is life-disrupting.

Recently, while driving to pick up an 80-year-old friend for her birthday lunch, my heart launched into its familiar convulsions for no godly reason. At the first red light, I jammed my car into park, threw my feet up onto the dashboard, flopped my seat back, and gagged myself. Yet the seismic shaking continued. When the cars behind me started honking, I realized I couldn’t do this anymore.

So I had the dang heart surgery — known as a cardiac ablation. Doctors feed a tiny catheter up through a vein in your groin all the way to your ticker, triggering the misfire and then burning the pesky nerve that will. Not. Shut. Up.

Think of it as an earthquake retrofit for humans.

I had my doubts as they wheeled me into the surgery: Reggae music was blasting. Someone whooped, “Friday vibes!” And a masked gal in scrubs told me this terrible joke as they began flooding me with night-night juice:

What do you call a deer who can’t see?

No-eye dear.

(Say it out loud. But never repeat it, for all that is holy.)

I awoke to find half of my pubes shaved (straight down the middle, harlequin style — which seems an odd choice) and my heart pumping … normally, you guys. Reliably. Predictably. For the first time in memory.

Bye-bye, butterflies. Adios, adenosine. My most vital organ became a veritable metronome, ticking and tocking in a beautifully boring and ultimately unterrifying way.

And I feel like an audacious renegade; no, a pirate — I feel like a swaggering, grown-ass pirate as I daringly order and slurp down espressos now. Which I do often, as I toast to fricking science.

Drink up, me hearties, yo ho.