Freezing (and Healing) My Heart
It’s the beginning of spring here in Kodiak, but it’s been winter in my heart. Last week I was wheeled on a gurney into the bowels of the Alaska Heart Institute. I wanted to be clever. I knew pieces of my heart were about to be frozen. I wanted to say to the doctor, “I’m a writer. Don’t freeze too much of my heart. I can’t write without it.” But I didn’t. There wasn’t time.
In 2 minutes flat, I was out. Which was a relief. I was tired from a year of panting after a racing arrhythmic heart. I had written a book and a half and traveled around the world with that unsteady beat and I needed a break. At least a really good nap. I got it. The catheter cryoablation took five hours.
It’s a strangely wondrous procedure. In shorthand, a tiny balloon of -30C - -60C liquid nitrogen or nitrous oxide is pumped through a catheter to the portions of the heart where the rogue electrical currents are sending it on a jazzy riff. Those areas are frozen so as they heal and scar, they’ll no longer trigger or conduct the signals.
It’s been a week since the procedure. I flew home the next day. My heart is still smarting. (The areas needing ablation were “extensive,” the nurse tells me afterward.) It will take 1 – 3 months for the scarring to form, for the heart to skip its staccato and relax into legato. The success rate is high and I am optimistic.
But I am an impatient patient. My husband Duncan has been sweet and supportive. The nurses and doctor were caring in every way. But I’d really like my old conductor to reappear, the boring one who metronomically waved a baton that everyone in the blood-and-body orchestra could count on. How well the percussion section followed, beating and powering me through decades of running, fishing, pregnancy, aerobics, chasing toddlers, kayaking, building houses. I have always been strong and fast. Now, recovering, stairs have become a mountain.
While I rest, friends have shared their own experiences and advice. It’s been encouraging and enlightening. Several gave advice on how to “fix the damage” the doctor did to my heart. But I want them to understand, the damage is the repair. The scarring is the mending.
I would not understand this without Jesus. At 15 I discovered that the scars and stripes of his beating were for our healing. So I gave him my heart. All of it. (“Heal my heart, three-person’d God!) And he did.
But over the years I keep snatching it back. Like Stephen Crane’s creature in the desert I have hoarded and hid it from its Maker. I have feasted on its salty bitterness. Again and again. And maybe I always will.
Except now, I am listening. I don’t want to waste any of this. The words of Karl Shapiro’s poem come back to me, the off-beat iamb of of my heart echoing the iambic meter of his:
(final stanza from “The Leg”)
The body, what is it, Father, but a sign
To love the force that grows us, to give back
What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?
Knead, knead the substance of our understanding
Which must be beautiful in flesh to walk,
That if Thou take me angrily in hand
And hurl me to the shark, I shall not die!
——Karl Shapiro