Last night, just after we left my parents’ house after a late dinner, my stepfather laid on the couch and said to my mother, “I need to talk with you.” She was in the midst of a phone conversation with other family members but was happy to oblige my stepdad and interrupt it. Hanging up she asked, “What’s up?” “I think I’m having symptoms of a coronary,” he said. They went to the ER at a Worcester, Massachusetts medical facility, my stepdad was extensively poked, prodded and monitored, and there he stayed the night. Early this morning, he was woken and poked, prodded and monitored some more. My mother called me to give me the update, which did come as a surprise, seeing as how we had just spent the entire previous day with them and there was no sign that anything was wrong.
It turned out that during a rigorous hike in nearby Purgatory Chasm—all rocks and crevasses—my stepdad had been feeling a little woozy and weird and tightness in the chest, and then later, cooking dinner for all of us, he’d felt it again. My mother and I were on our own café excursion at the time, and my stepdad was with River and the kids on the hike and prepping dinner. He never breathed a word of his woes to River… and waited until we were gone to say a peep to my mom. Good thing it did not become something full-blown. At the moment I still do not know what happened to him, and I haven’t heard an update in several hours (since the call this morning).
Meanwhile, River is having his own heart issues today. At a recent physical screening, he talked with the doctor about his heart racing. The doctor ordered blood work and a two-week EKG monitoring. River dropped by a local hospital to get wired this morning, right around the same time my mom called to tell me about my stepfather. When I told her about River’s heart situation, she reminded me that she had been similarly monitored for a heart irregularity a couple of years ago.
We mused about how tenuous hearts are—for that matter, the whole human body, the entire system—and how easily they can go kaput based on a small problem with electricity or water or some other such basic element of the regular lub dub. I am kind of amazed that our bodies can last as long as they do, that hearts can go on pumping like this from our conception to our death, not really failing or becoming lax in that ongoing work, for years and years and years.
Just thinking about how my heart is doing makes my pulse quicken a bit.