Kim Cowperthwaite - Mind Over Heart Matters
Kim Cowperthwaite lives in Windham, Maine and is a middle school English language arts teacher and writer. She had a spontaneous coronary artery dissection and open heart surgery with bypass graft at age 47. She blogs at Every Open Heart.
Two years post-SCAD and still it does not take much to send me into a mind nutty if something seems askew with my heart. Today it happened at the gym -- a thousand shooting fireworks of thought. Shrieking chimps, Chicken Littles. "The sky is falling! This is it! Your heart's exploding!"
I had strolled up to the recumbent cycle like I always do. There was happy music playing. Felt fine and dandy. I adjusted my seat, hopped on, began to pedal slowly. Got the settings I wanted. Fat Burn. 30 minutes. Age 49. Enter. Then I gripped the side handles to get a read on my starting heart rate. That's when the fireworks began. Heart rate: 178.
178! 188! 190 ...and climbing! Bells! Whistles! My mind went berserk. Words ran across my mind's eye in a digital display: tachycardia....cardiac arrest. My eyes darted over to the AED device on the wall. There it was, in a box, lightning bolt down through the heart on the front. Did they train the young man behind the front desk on how to use it? Wait, I'm trained. Can I do it to myself?
Next across my field of vision came Fred Sanford from one of my childhood TV favorites of the 1970's, Sanford and Son. Fred staggered, like he so often did on the show, clutching his chest with his right hand, left hand stretched up to heaven to call to his wife, "I'm comin' Elizabeth!"
Would I stagger like Fred or drop sideways onto the floor? Maybe I'd just slump forward onto the display and be discovered later when someone wanted to use the bike during the late afternoon workout rush.
The display. It began to flash, sputter, shut down. Off. Nothing but a blank screen. Out of order. Dead. The cycle display, not me.
Hmm.
When the voice of reason takes charge of the shrieking mind monkeys, it is magnanimous. "There, there now. See, it's just the machine. Must have had a glitch. Why, that would have scared anybody. You're fine now."
I looked left. I looked right. No one seemed to have noticed the riot that just ended in my head. All of ten seconds must have passed.
I moved to another cycle and began my workout again. Heart rate 86. (Whew) Enter.
These bursts of panic over misunderstandings or slight inconsistencies have come up a couple of times over the past two years. Certainly, I know this is a type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Do SCAD survivors all have it to some degree? I suspect we must. I also think it is very normal given what we have experienced and I accept it as such.
When it comes to matters of the heart, my mind will always probably be a bit overly alert and sometimes outright ridiculous. Though all doctors and all tests have told me I am well and my heart is functioning normally, my mind remains a vigilant watchdog. So it is. I accept it all as part of my healing.
Two years post-SCAD and still it does not take much to send me into a mind nutty if something seems askew with my heart. Today it happened at the gym -- a thousand shooting fireworks of thought. Shrieking chimps, Chicken Littles. "The sky is falling! This is it! Your heart's exploding!"
I had strolled up to the recumbent cycle like I always do. There was happy music playing. Felt fine and dandy. I adjusted my seat, hopped on, began to pedal slowly. Got the settings I wanted. Fat Burn. 30 minutes. Age 49. Enter. Then I gripped the side handles to get a read on my starting heart rate. That's when the fireworks began. Heart rate: 178.
178! 188! 190 ...and climbing! Bells! Whistles! My mind went berserk. Words ran across my mind's eye in a digital display: tachycardia....cardiac arrest. My eyes darted over to the AED device on the wall. There it was, in a box, lightning bolt down through the heart on the front. Did they train the young man behind the front desk on how to use it? Wait, I'm trained. Can I do it to myself?
Next across my field of vision came Fred Sanford from one of my childhood TV favorites of the 1970's, Sanford and Son. Fred staggered, like he so often did on the show, clutching his chest with his right hand, left hand stretched up to heaven to call to his wife, "I'm comin' Elizabeth!"
Would I stagger like Fred or drop sideways onto the floor? Maybe I'd just slump forward onto the display and be discovered later when someone wanted to use the bike during the late afternoon workout rush.
The display. It began to flash, sputter, shut down. Off. Nothing but a blank screen. Out of order. Dead. The cycle display, not me.
Hmm.
When the voice of reason takes charge of the shrieking mind monkeys, it is magnanimous. "There, there now. See, it's just the machine. Must have had a glitch. Why, that would have scared anybody. You're fine now."
I looked left. I looked right. No one seemed to have noticed the riot that just ended in my head. All of ten seconds must have passed.
I moved to another cycle and began my workout again. Heart rate 86. (Whew) Enter.
These bursts of panic over misunderstandings or slight inconsistencies have come up a couple of times over the past two years. Certainly, I know this is a type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Do SCAD survivors all have it to some degree? I suspect we must. I also think it is very normal given what we have experienced and I accept it as such.
When it comes to matters of the heart, my mind will always probably be a bit overly alert and sometimes outright ridiculous. Though all doctors and all tests have told me I am well and my heart is functioning normally, my mind remains a vigilant watchdog. So it is. I accept it all as part of my healing.
