Freshwater Literary Journal 2021

Lee Grossman Life and Death I have always been on good terms with my doctor. Russell and I understand each other. As a master hypochondriac, I have used my medical education to conjure up some truly arcane and sometimes charmingly quaint threats to my well being. Journeymen hypochondriacs worry about strokes or cancer; I tend more toward yaws or pinta or leishmaniasis. Some doctors would be annoyed by my bottomless need for reassurance, but Russell finds my sense of doom entertaining. He doesn’t complain about getting paid for his work, but I am grandiose enough to suspect that, in my case, the money is just a bonus.

It was with this history in mind that Russell responded to the message about the arrhythmia. I had been sitting in my office taking my pulse (even apprentice hypochondriacs know that one) and noticed that it was irregular. I felt fine at the time, no symptoms of any kind, unless you count compulsively taking my pulse as a symptom. It was what doctors call an incidental finding.

Still, you can’t be too careful; I called Russell.

At the end of his day, he called me back. He spoke in that voice you use to tell your child that, yes, there are bad people in the world, but we aren’t going to let you get kidnapped. He reminded me of the usual preliminary steps we would normally go through to evaluate this finding—physical exam, EKG, treadmill test—and he told me that we both knew that if they were all negative, I still wouldn’t be satisfied, so he suggested we go right to a Holter monitor. A Holter monitor is a device about the size of a paperback book that you carry around for twenty-four hours while it records your heart rhythm. Then a computer scans the entire record and prints up a report.

I stopped by after work on Monday to get hooked up, and then I dropped the gadget off at the end of the day on Tuesday. Late Wednesday morning Russell called me.

“The Holter results just came in. They are concerning. You have to go to the hospital.” “Concerning” is a medical euphemism for “alarming.” I said okay, and asked when he thought I should do that. I told him I’d be done in the office at five o’clock, but I imagined he’d say the next morning would be fine.

“No, now. You have to go now.”

Russell is not an alarmist; he is not even a concernist. So I was out the door and on my way to the hospital. It is a curious event when a black belt hypochondriac finds out something is seriously wrong. You would think I would have been prepared. The fact was, I felt cheated; all that worrying in advance had failed to inoculate me against disaster.

I arrived at the hospital and signed forms. After an exhaustive diagnostic assessment of my insurance and finances, I was admitted—to the Intensive 73