So some of the things I’ve been thinking of lately. One is a mediocre to crappy plot for a story which must be in the crappy category because when I thought of writing it down it made me just want to go back and delete. Its great how you can do that when you are writing. So many times I wish I could go back and delete things that I’ve said… instead they churn over in my mind, litanies of unpleasant words I’ve said. Blah. I am taking this opportunity to throw out a blanket apology for stupid things I might have said to people. People, I say stupid things sometimes. I’m in an introspective mood. This probably isn’t good.
So the past year brought me to the age of 30 and the seeming conclusion of my life as a “healthy” person. The only marked difference I can feel at the moment is something that is gone haywire with my heart. I guess that is a big deal. I don’t want to be a downer but I think the hardest part of getting cancer is that you become a person with cancer. In my case I might be a person with cancer and a heart condition. All of the sudden. I’ve never broken a bone, never had my tonsils or appendix out. I have had 4 easy, complication-free pregnancies and deliveries. Now, somehow I am inextricably diseased. Being categorized like that bothers me. For health insurance purposes I am a money-loser, a risk. The heart trouble came about, I believe as a result of the thyroid surgeries. At least that is the first time it ever registered. I spent an entire day with a young cardiologist who literally made me wait in the exam room for over 4 hours while he researched on the Internet possible conditions I could have. Which made me think that there must not be anything wrong with me. Since I have diagnosed myself with low-blood calcium which does affect the electrical function of the heart. But one thing that struck me when I was going through the long day with the young cardiologist was that he said that I had 2000 extra beats when they had me wear the holter monitor. (Now I’m not sure how you can really calculate “extra” beats…maybe premature beats is what he said?) I asked him how many heartbeats do you get in a lifetime? I don’t know if he didn’t hear me or didn’t know, but he didn’t answer my question. So good old google gave the answer, about 3 billion give or take a couple hundred million. So I was going to try to do the math to figure out how many days of my life 2000 beats extra would take off. Because did you know that all species get approximately the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime? Yeah, hummingbirds don’t live that long, but their hearts beat super fast. Elephants live a long time with slow heartbeats. So it seems to me that you get so many heartbeats a lifetime, there must be some mortal equation God has worked out. Some people live longer than others, so do their hearts just use up all their beats faster? They say that before an execution people’s heart-rates go insanely high. Is that the heart’s way of using up as many as it can before its prematurely extinguished? Hearts are associated with things other than pumping blood. Love, decision making. The heart is what makes us mortal. So I didn’t get very far with my calculation because for one, I don’t know how many zeros are in a billion. Hello google. Apparently, there is no solid answer for that. Did you know that it depends on where you are from? Seriously, a billion in America has 9 zeros and in Europe it has 12! So does that mean that Europeans live longer? Um, wikipedia? Yep. Now if you know me, you would wisely surmise that there is no way I could ever have figured out mathematically how many years are being shaved off of my life with 2000 extra beats per day. I have never been good at math. I literally have nightmares that my diplomas are being taken away from me because I didn’t pass that math class after all…college and high-school diplomas. And I have to go back and take high-school math. Nightmare. Anyway. I’m thinking that if I move to Europe now, the extra 3 zeros in a billion might somehow absorb the 2000 extra beats and I’ll live a normal, healthy lifetime.
