by Harry Pickens
I woke up in the morning worried.
I worried all through the day.
I worried when I went to bed.
Every single day, my entire day was lived in anticipation of the 10 to 12 times my heartbeat would skip. It started just a few months before, with that first incident of an irregular heartbeat, when the doctor assigned to my case came to my hospital bedside and made his pronouncement:
You have atrial fibrillation. You have a high risk of stroke. If we can’t control it with medication, we will have to use the defibrillator to give you a shock.
I was 35 years old. This was not supposed to be happening.
I was in the band room downstairs at the University of Louisville when it first happened.
Suddenly, I felt something strange in my chest. At first it felt like my heart skipped a beat, but the strange feeling didn’t stop. It actually felt as through my heart was thrashing around in my chest like the Tasmanian devil in those old Bugs Bunny cartoons.
Was I having a heart attack? I didn’t feel any pain, just this weird sensation. Almost as quickly as it began, the feeling went away. I was a bit freaked out, but since everything felt okay now, I didn’t say or do anything.
Six weeks later, sitting in the hospital bed. I realized, this had been a precursor of what would occur that Labor day weekend in 1996. That Friday morning, I was preparing to register for my second year of graduate school. I felt zero desire to be in grad school, was totally uninspired by the curriculum, and no longer felt any relevance at all between the degree I was pursuing and my career trajectory.
I had enrolled in grad school primarily out of a sense of fear and desperation that I needed more structure in my life. I was only a few years past a stressful divorce, had lived in four different cities in four years, and was more confused about my next steps than at any prior time in my life. I was afraid I might just drift aimlessly through the rest of my 30’s — or forever.
I had to find structure somewhere.
At the same time, graduate school was not working out. Every day felt like I was wasting my time — and my life. But I was planning to stay the course — even though no part of me was really committed to it. Obviously, there was a huge integrity gap between the life I was living on the outside and who I was on the inside, but I was unwilling or unable to face it.
Until that Friday morning.
I picked up the phone to register for my fall semester classes, and my heart spoke to me loud and clear. The instant I picked up the phone, I felt it. This was familiar; the same exact sensation I felt in the band room two months prior. Only this time it didn’t go away.
My heart felt like it was sputtering. I put my hand on the side of my neck to check my pulse and it sounded like a drunken morse code, with no discernible pattern of regularity or consistency. Then I felt light headed, and fear totally took over. Shit. I was going to have a heart attack right here and die.
What to do? I took a bus the 9 blocks to campus and practically stumbled into the student health center. I have an emergency. My heart has been beating really erratically. Can you help me?
The nurse on duty saw me immediately, and confirmed my fluttering heartbeat. We’re going to take you over to the hospital emergency room right now. You are in atrial fibrillation, and it would be best to see what they might be able to do to help you get back into a normal sinus rhythm.
Three days later, I was released from the hospital, my heart beating normally, but my mind’s pulse and beat was still wildly out of synch. The attending physician told me I would have to take medication for the rest of my life. I thought this a ridiculous assumption. I could not see how a single incident of irregular heartbeat would require that an otherwise healthy 35 year old succumb to a lifetime of pharmaceutical intervention.
I didn’t like the way I felt in the moments after I took the pills. I have always been hypersensitive to any substance placed in my body, and this was no exception. I felt less alert, more spacey, strangely off-kilter. Plus, every so often, even though my heart was back in a normal rhythm, it would start racing uncontrollably. Then I would really freak out. I realized later these were panic attacks, triggered by my fear of going back into atrial fib.
So for the next several months, although complying with doctor’s orders, I lived in a state of constant and fearful anticipation of the next time my heart would skip a beat. My intuition continued to scream that staying on this medication for life was not in my body’s best interest.
I decided to go back to San Diego and see another doctor who I had known when I lived there.
Dr. Mimi Guarneri was not only a board-certified cardiologist, she was also a pioneer in complementary medicine and in mind-body approaches to healing and wellness. Perhaps she would have another opinion and could help me treat this condition more holistically. She astutely asked me some questions that the doctors in Louisville didn’t think to ask:
Do you drink coffee? No.
Do you eat chocolate? Why, yes. In fact, I have a major Hershey’s habit. Pretty much every day on my way home from school I would eat one or two Hershey Bars. I love the mint ones, and the ones with peanuts.
Did you realize that chocolate is high in caffeine? No.
Not only that, caffeine alone can trigger a rapid heart rate, and sometimes atrial fibrillation, especially when combined with emotional stress.
Bingo. That explained it.
In fact, the night before my Friday morning debacle, I feasted on dessert after dinner, a devastating knock-out-punch combining chocolate cake, a fudge brownie, coffee ice cream and hot chocolate sauce with the moniker Death by Chocolate.
Oops.
A few months later, I moved back to San Diego after giving up on grad school.
I was feeling much better. Except for one thing: every day, I still mentally and emotionally waited for the “shoe to drop.”
I waited for my heart to go out of rhythm again. I waited for one of those now several-times a day moments when my heart would seem to burp, skipping a beat or two, one right after the other. Then would come the fear, panic, worry plus the now familiar cascade of compulsive thoughts.
What if it happens again? What if the rhythm never goes back to normal? What if I have to go back to the hospital? What if I have to get back on medication for the rest of my life? What if I die? What if? What if?
I was doing everything I knew to stay healthy.
I cleaned my diet up, took supplemental magnesium and Vitamin C and did everything else that Dr. Guarneri recommended, I meditated. I exercised. At this point, she had helped me slowly wean off of the meditation. I felt much closer to normal, but nothing could crack this worry habit.
One day I was researching the heart. I discovered that this miraculous organ beats approximately one hundred thousand times every 24 hours. Then I finally got it.
My heart is beating 100,000 times every 24 hours. Out of those 100,000 beats, perhaps 8 or 10 times a day I would feel a skipped or racing heartbeat. That’s less than one in every 10,000 beats.
But I am not focusing at all on the 99,990 times every day that my heart is doing it’s job perfectly. Nope. I am fixating on the 8 or 10 times when things are off. Something is wrong with this picture. My heart had been working perfectly over 99.98% of the time, yet I was practically ignoring this total miracle to focus only on the skipped beats.
Wow.
What if I start appreciating my amazing heart for what’s it’s doing right? What if I actually affirm my gratitude and love for its steady and unfailing devotion to continuing to do its job even in the face of my mental neglect and constant worry?
From that moment on, I would often during the day take a moment and gratefully acknowledge my heart for its tireless dedication to keeping me alive. I would place my attention and awareness and appreciation firmly in the direction of what was working, not on what was broken.
I would focus on what was right, not so much on what was wrong. I wouldn’t be pollyanna-stupid, ignoring real warning signs, but I also wouldn’t obsess on the temporary blips in my heart’s otherwise impeccable track record.
My heart taught me a life changing lesson during those precarious months.
I still had occasional skipped beats (I later learned that these PVC’s - premature ventricular contractions — were not dangerous, and were likely exacerbated by stress and nutritional imbalances), but my primary focus was not on what didn’t work, but what was working.
Eventually the PVC’s went away. I had two more incidents of atrial fibrillation within the next five years, both during times of extreme emotional stress. One time required a hospital visit (only for a few hours this time), and the second time, my normal sinus rhythm returned within minutes.
That was 25 years ago.
Since then, my heart has rarely skipped a beat.
When it does, I just remember the other 99,999.