Like the Movement of Tongues

Today I was grumpier than usual on my way to the Cardio Pulmonary Center. I try to never go to the doctors negative, as if my very attitude will register in my blood, contaminate the tests. But today as we drove up to the building, which is a Senior Health Center, I couldn’t stifle that moment of self-pity that I am a young women whose health is monitored along with those in their seventies—survivors of heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure.

I have fantasies of sitting in the waiting room of a sports medicine doctor—with other virile, athletic twenty and thirty-somethings, in running shorts and tennis shoes, my ankle wrapped from twisting on a hike, or my wrist sprained from a spirited racquetball session. I daydream about what it would be like to get an ice pack and ibuprofen and to be told to lay off the gym for a couple of weeks.

But my misfortune and fortune is that I am young in an office of the old; other folks, including the staff, wondering why I am there. Today was a follow up echocardiogram on my pericarditis and pericardial effusion. Recently, my blood work has shown improvement but the chest pains persist and the question is whether or not the inflammation of my heart is continuing or if long-term scar tissue has formed, meaning that pain will likely always persist as a trace of my January 2009.

I am called in, put on the customary robe, the probes are affixed. I am on my side, ultrasound gel dripping down my chest as the tech leans into the screen squinting. It makes me anxious to try to divine the expression—concerned? alarmed? everything normal? My strategy is to instead concentrate on other details. I look at the tech’s highlights, split ends, I see that she’s reading King Leopold’s Ghost, it’s sitting on the desk, and she’s about a quarter in. I read the post-its on her bulletin board, I look out the window, looks like it might rain. I try to practice the meditation phrase from last night’s session, “Calming my whole body, I breathe in. Calming my whole body, I breathe out.” But the movement of the rubber baton, fixing it into place above my heart over and over again interrupts my try at calm.

The music in the background is faint, but these songs play in this order: Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” followed by “Freakshow [on the Dancefloor],” then “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which isn’t as funny to me as it should be. Once in a while the tech ups the sound on the echocardiogram machine and I can hear the amplified beat of my heart. It is like the thumping of a frog in an attempt to escape a plastic barrel, hitting the walls repeatedly—persistent yet irregular.

At the end of the exam I wipe the ultrasound gel of my chest and neck, I say thank you to this person I have become strangely intimate with. Then the tech leaves the room and Patricia and I talk as I get dressed. She says the screen looked like a normal heart to her, she smiles. Last time I got a chest ultrasound, Patricia said she loved watching the beating of my heart. She said the movement, the whoosh-whoosh of my heart muscle looked like tongues moving, like kissing. Her sweetness makes me want to be stronger, to not complain, to be grateful. And I am, and on the way out of the Senior Health Center I wish to one day be old.