I spuddle.

On Tuesday morning at the insanely early hour of 7:15, I went to the hospital for a heart test that I’ve had probably half a dozen times since I was diagnosed with Mitral Valve Prolapse as a child.   The test is called an echocardiogram and if you’ve had one or have ever watched ER or Grey’s Anatomy, you know it is a non-invasive ultrasound of your heart that’s exactly like the non-invasive ultrasounds you get when you are pregnant to find out the sex of your child and also if your child has all its limbs and whatnot, but mostly to find out the sex.    When the ultrasound is baby-related, you have to drink so many gallons of water beforehand that if someone even nudges you gently, you spray urine out of every pore for forty-five entire minutes.   When the ultrasound is heart-related, there is no prep, but I took the precaution of lying awake all the previous night worrying about sleeping through the test, worrying that the test would show that I had a rare form of heart cancer, worrying that — ironically! — I was, in fact, having a heart attack right THEN and wouldn’t it be cruel if I died of a heart-related condition while lying awake worrying about a heart-related test.   I do live a life rich in medical-irony, in that I’m both a hypochondriac AND often smited (smote?) with unusual things that make doctors say things such as, “Wow, I’ve never seen that before, do you mind if I call my colleague Dr. X and let him also look at your skin/brain/nervous system/vagina?”

But I digress.

My usual M.O. when faced with any kind of medical situation is to turn up the funny, so I showed up for the test that I did not sleep through in spite of the dream I had that I did sleep through it, ready to brighten the tech’s day with my non-stop witticisms.    Unfortunately for me, she was having none of it.   Like, seriously, none.   I’m sure if she had a ruler, she would have used it to rap me sharply on the knuckles for speaking at all, much less for saying such hilarious one-liners as, “So is it a boy or a girl?”  (Her response, “This is a heart test, ma’am.”)   She really missed her calling.   She should have been a nun, circa 1920, teaching at a strict boarding school that featured The Ruler as well as maybe hair shirts and self-flagellation.

Like I said, I’ve had this test at least six times before, if not more than that.   I pretty much know how it goes.   However, this was the first time I’d had a tech roll her eyes, sigh with irritation, and say, “I don’t know who told you that you have a mitral valve prolapse, there’s nothing wrong with your mitral valve.”

“Sorry,” I said, as though maybe I’d made the whole thing up and not that I’d undergone batteries of cardiac tests as a pre-teen and been diagnosed by a, you know, CARDIOLOGIST, as opposed to relying on an ultrasound tech for diagnosis and treatment.  “Maybe I grew out of it?”

“YOU DON’T GROW OUT OF A MITRAL VALVE PROLAPSE,” she roared disdainfully, if you can roar disdainfully.   I’m sure she did.   It was the kind of thing she was good at, I was fast learning.

All the while, she was gouging into my chest with the ultrasound wand, something I remembered being much more gentle in the past.   You know those faith healers who can reach into your abdomen and pull out some kind of pulsing chicken heart?   It was like that, only without the healing or the chicken heart or the faith.

“Is it suppose to hurt?” I ventured.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she said.  “It’s non-invasive.”

She sighed again, with such alarm that I became concerned.  “What?  What?” I said.  “Am I having a cardiac embolism?”

“NO,” she said.  “The button came off my KEYBOARD.”

“Oh!” I said, brightly, because actually I was kind of relieved to not be actively dying.   “You never see THAT on Star Trek.”   Then I did a brilliant impression of Uhuru or whatever her name is pulling the button off the whatever it was that she operated in her tiny short skirt.

“What?” she said.

“On Star Trek,” I said.  “The equipment never fell apart.   Doesn’t really inspire confidence, does it?”

“It’s just a BUTTON,” she said.   I was beginning to pick up on the vibe that maybe this woman did not like me, or my sense of humour.   So I shut up.

“You’re ALMOST in normal syncope,” she said.

Now I have no idea what that means, but I’m pretty sure I’d rather hear that sentence without the word “almost” inserted into it in capital letters.

“Great!” I said.   At that point, I just wanted to get along.   When I got home, I looked up “normal syncope” and found out that it refers to a temporary loss of consciousness associated with heart irregularities.   None of which makes sense in the context she used it in, so I can only assume she had no idea what she was talking about, or I could go ahead and guess that she’s RIGHT and I have a horrible heart problem and perhaps a week to live.  I like to waffle back and forth between these possibilities, and as a result have had chest pain all week.  Go, me.   I’m pretty sure it’s psychosomatic, or that I’m dying.    The results apparently take a week and although I’ve never before put a second thought into this particular test and its results, I’m now going to spend a bunch of time Googling and fretting while the kids jump up and down on my head and arm occasionally poking a finger into my eye and screaming “MEEP!” because once when The Birdy pressed my nose and said “MEEP!”, I responded by tickling her and she’s still hoping that there is SOME part of me that she could poke that will result in hilarity and tickling as opposed to resulting in snappish Mummy threatening the naughty chair if she loses the sight in her right eye as a result of a misdirected “MEEP!” while she was trying to type a blog post.

The test went on for about forty minutes and involved a lot of bruising.  By the end of it, I was just closing my eyes and hoping for it to be over, when she said, “Your lung is REALLY in the way, I can hardly even SEE your heart.”  As though maybe other people on whom she performs this test actually don’t have a pesky lung making her job EVEN MORE DIFFICULT THAN IT ALREADY IS.

As I was leaving, she suddenly transmogrified into a completely different person.  “Nice to meet you!” she said.  “Hope you have a great day!  How’s the weather out there?”

“Fine,” I said.   And I left, slamming the door behind me, only it wasn’t the kind of door that you can slam, it was one of those slow-closers, which didn’t exactly impart the dramatic gesture of displeasure I was hoping to communicate.   Oh wells, there’s always next year or five years from now or whenever I have it done again.    Stay tuned.

Filed under: Health, Me, Myself and I