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| I am machine! 4-11-2007. |
| I am currently wearing electrodes. Okay, let’s back up a minute. I haven’t written a new post for a long time, and I owe my reading public—-all four of you—-an apology. For the last six months, my life has been a never-ending series of airplane rides, phone calls, and unforeseen stresses. It’s been tough for me to sit down and write because I haven’t been in the same place for more than three weeks at a stretch since Thanksgiving. In short, I’m moving. I hate moving. I don’t know anyone who actually likes moving, but I think I loathe it more than most. On a scale of “one” to “shit sandwich,” moving is right up there with Nazism and splinters. As a creature of habit, I am exquisitely (some might say insanely) sensitive to disruptions to my routine. Unless I know I’m going to be settled for at least a month, I can’t write. Unreasonable, you say? Perhaps. But being reasonable didn’t get me published. Nor did it earn me these rock-hard abs. Anyhoo just thinking about moving makes me insomniac, gives me headaches, and induces heart palpitations. For real. That’s the reason I’m wearing the aforementioned electrodes: starting in February, I began feeling my heart “hiccupping” every once in a while, contracting out of sync and way too suddenly, as though pumped by an angry, invisible hand. To determine the nature and source of these palpitations, my doctor has given me a device called an “event monitor,” which is roughly the size of a Palm Pilot, except that it’s connected to my (note: still rock-hard) abdomen. Call it an “Abs Pilot” or, if you will, a “Palpitation Pilot.” The PP records my heartbeat continuously. When I experience a hiccup, I press the record button, and the previous 30 seconds of heart activity are stored and archived. When I fill up the memory, I phone the doctor's office and download the data via the landline. (It’s all rather Get Smart.) Then I start monitoring again. The cycle repeats for two weeks, by the end of which I hope to have snagged enough of the palpitations to yield a diagnosis. I’m also scheduled to go in for a combination stress-test-echocardiogram, which should help clarify the clinical picture. My cardiologist—-doesn’t that seem out of place, coming from an otherwise healthy 28 year-old man?-—is a blessedly intelligent and thoughtful man. Understandably, he’s a little concerned about turning me into what he calls a “cardiac neurotic.” But given the fact that I’ve felt similar (albeit less frequent) palpitations in the past, and that I have a minor mitral valve prolapse, he has elected to put my mind at ease by giving me as much information as he can. For that I am grateful. I suspect that once I understand the benignity of my palpitations—-for I am fairly confident that they are, in fact, benign—-they’ll go away. Refusing to accept stress is the best first step to showing it the door. And that’s why I’m trying to see the humor in the wires trailing out from beneath my T-shirt. To begin with, I’ve had to shave my chest. Not all of it, but just a patch on the upper right pectoral. (Did I mention that my pecs are enormous? Well, they are.) But no amount of ripped, raw-beef manliness can compensate for the fact that I look flat-out silly, like the vast, stubbly canvas upon which a bunch of tiny drunken aliens botched their attempt at crop circles. (Oh, juh-heeez, we cut too wide. Fuggedaboudit, let’s find us another Ashkenazi!) I thought, briefly, about shaving my entire chest for the sake of consistency, but I’ve been told by those in the know that such experiments invariably have an itchy conclusion. So I’ve confined the manscaping to the necessary area and no more. Then there’s the device itself, which beeps whenever you press a button. When you press the record button, the beeping goes on for about 30 seconds. Now, that isn’t too bad when you’ve hit the button on purpose, but when you accidentally bump into a desk and the thing goes off, people start to give you funny looks. You have a hip-check alarm? Not to mention the extreme awkwardness of having this THING in my pocket at all times. I hate having extra stuff in my pockets. While having extra stuff in my pockets does not begin to approach moving on the "shit sandwich" scale, I nevertheless resent feeling weighed down, especially by electronics. And when I take the device out of my pocket, I have nowhere to put it. When I change my pants, I have to clip the PP to my underwear, or else rest it on a nearby shelf, or--least pleasantly--let it dangle by its wires, which tug at the electrodes I have glued to the skin of my so delicate--yet so unfathomably masculine--torso. On the plus side, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a cyborg. Honestly, I don’t have much to complain about. As I said before, I consider myself a healthy guy, and as far as medical procedures go, an event monitor is hardly the end of the world. If anything, it serves as a stark reminder, every time I look in the mirror, that I am flesh and blood (and cyborg!), that one day I’ll have real problems to worry about, that I should be grateful for functioning kidneys, working lungs, an intact liver. There are more important things to lose sleep over than moving, stubbly pecs, or a pocket full of medical parephernalia. On that note, I’m going to go do some sit-ups. I have an image to maintain, you see. |
