180 Heartbeats to Go By Kayla Gistinger The sound of a human heartbeat is a powerful thing. For new mothers, it represents a new life beginning; yet, for others it becomes a clock that is slowly running out of time. There are some ancient civilizations that used to believe that each person was born with a preset number of heartbeats for their entire life and when that one runs out of heartbeats, they will die. Well if that’s true, I am royally screwed. Yes, a heartbeat is a powerful thing--because for me, it meant the end of many things I held dear. I could no longer dance--a simple pleasure I had enjoyed for 15 years. I remember having to wear a heart monitor for three agonizing weeks. The wires slithered around me and entangles me in their grasps. The box it was attached to dug painfully into my ribs as I slept, leaving a bruise in the morning. It became a mechanical routine where I would wake up and untangle myself. Come night time i would peel the electrodes off; they were leeches in for the long haul and they did not take to being removed kindly. Everyone began to treat me as if I was walking on eggshells; it was stifling, Whenever I got a new restriction that I was upset about, someone would have the nerve to tell me “well at least you’re still alive” or “dance will always be there later.” This is possibly the worst thing you could say to someone when the world starts to crumble around them. It is like telling a person who is shot they were being melodramatic. I felt as though I had a right to be upset and everyone kept trying to invalidate my pain based on the fact that I was still alive. I had been living with a rapid heart beat for years and I was fine, and yet in my senior year, the problem wormed its way to the surface and people begin to care about it. I was supposed to get my 15 year dance trophy that I had been pining after forever and go to theme parks for school field trips. With all my medical problems, it all seemed to slip through my fingers. I was at the cardiologists every other week. My racing heart made me painfully aware of my everyday life, but that awareness made me learn many things. I needed to learn to take the strict structure I had built into my life and unravel it. I stressed myself out way too much and it was negatively affecting my life. I could no longer use the benchmark alarms in the morning that told me when I needed to have certain tasks done. I had to take things in my life that would normally send my heart racing into a marathon with a failed test at the finish line and force myself not to care about the 26
bad outcome that may ensue. If my heart was going to race, I was going to make sure it had a reason to. I had to choose my moments because with a resting heartbeat of 180 beats per minute, the world seemed to slow to a crawl. If I was only born with a finite number of heartbeats, I was going to make each damn one count and spend it on the most exciting moments of my life. I would let it race in anticipation as I leaned in for a kiss or permit palpitations to pass as I tried something new and exciting. SO maybe being “grounded” from my everyday tasks sucked and maybe I had to put some things on the back burner for now, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I just had to choose my moments.
27
