Noisy heart

“Has anyone ever told you you have a heart murmur?” asked the cardiologist, extracting a stethoscope plug from his ear. “Could be a leaky valve.”

I was in his office to talk about palpitations, long runs of crazy rhythm ten times a day, bad enough that I’d cough insanely and have a hard time focusing on anything useful. The week before, I’d picked up a Holter monitor from his building and walked around for a couple of days with electrodes on my chest, keeping a log of all the behaviors and emotions that, as far as I could tell, bore absolutely no relation to the arrhythmia.

Looking at the results, he pronounced, “Premature ventricular contractions.” Early or extra beats. “Maybe hormones,” he continued, “or maybe we’ll never know. The PVCs are only worrisome if your heart is weak, so we’ll do more imaging to rule that out.”

Turns out, after an X-ray, a sonogram, and various other diagnostics, that my heart is perfectly healthy. It’s just noisy. And a bit jumpy. The blood burbles to itself as it goes about its business. I’m helping the little red muscle along as the cardiologist prescribed, by taking magnesium, and the palpitations aren’t bothersome at all anymore.

But a few weeks later, the diagnosis is still making me laugh. Of course I have a noisy heart—I’m a poet. I’m quiet enough in person, but every poem and blog post is a kind of cardiogram. My metrical poems incline to extra beats—iambs and trochees turning into anapests and dactyls without my permission. I’m even writing poems about palpitations (there are older ones in Radioland, because I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while). But I would rather have people peer inside me via a poem’s small machine than by medical technology, and there’s been too much of the latter lately.

On a much needed break from the radiology unit, I spent most of last week in LA at the annual AWP conference. This was my first time attending as an AWP board member rather than as a citizen-poet at large, so I spent less time at readings and panels than I would have liked, but I still had a lot of fun.(For an example of said fun, have a look and listen to Jeannine Hall Gailey’s report on the Women in Spec panel, with audio.) On a yearlong sabbatical, I’d had a hermit-like winter (aside from doctors’ appointments), so it was startling to find myself in a convention center holding thousands, most of them projecting the contents of their noisy hearts.

It also struck me that while just about every person at that conference had a deep allegiance to the power of words, most of the information we broadcast to each other still flows underneath language. I can’t always name what signals I’m registering when I have a gut feeling about someone—she’s ill, those dudes do NOT like each other, etc.—but I’ve learned, at least, that I know things that I don’t know that I know.

And then, post-AWP, I again became the diagnosee, which Word does not think is a word. After more prodding, imaging, and exsanguination, I ended up having surgery Friday morning with less than 24 hours notice, although it went very smoothly. I was home before lunchtime and had a much-needed quiet weekend, and in some ways already feel better than I did in LA. I just have some anemia to resolve now.

Which is good, because this wan, beef-eating, noisy-hearted poet is on her way to Kenyon College tomorrow. The details about my Monday evening poetry reading are here, and on Tuesday I visit poetry workshops run by Janet McAdams and Jennifer Clarvoe. I’m excited, although I have to say, LA’s weather forecast was rather nicer.