Not As Serious As A Heart Attack
Doctors think I'm fine. Tests look good and all that. Dehydration plus my body adapting to weight loss plus the medical profession not exactly being the most insightful body of individuals when it comes to vague yet troubling symptoms.
I am mostly relieved. Perhaps this is a passing thing related to the issues listed above or perhaps it's a semipermanent quirk of my physiology. That the escalation of my heart rate when standing vs. sitting seems to decrease proportionate with the amount of time since I last went to the gym made sense (and I went tonight, so hoo boy), but the fact that the return to what I'd consider "normal" seems to play out over several days continues to be weird.
On the other hand it's worth noting that without going into details there have been a number of occasions in the past two years when I've been seized by sudden physical exhaustion, shortness of breath, pounding heart, and general malaise, and at those times my confident self diagnosis was: "You're fat, [Medrawt]. This is what happens to fat people who overextend themselves physically." Having an apparent measurable symptom (even though I never felt anything wrong, which was its own psychological assault on what was my increasingly and ludicrously fragile state, the notion that my body was betraying me not once [by not even being healthy enough to handle the task of my making it healthier] but twice [by not giving me any indication that anything was wrong when IT SO CLEARLY WAS {not}] - there's a bunch of conditions that I guess have been melodramatically dubbed "the silent killer," and I became afraid of most of them [not of ovarian cancer]) wow that was a long parenthetical but I'm not going back to edit my approach to this sentence: having an apparent measurable symptom made me recontextualize those events into evidence of some deeper malaise, when the more reasonable course of behavior (dead mother notwithstanding) would've been to consider said measurable physical symptom and render the diagnosis: "You're fat, [Medrawt]. This is what happens to fat people who overextend themselves physically."
So I'm almost certainly fine and I kind of wish I hadn't posted the prior, er, post, but I think that kind of retroactive self-editing is inimical to the spirit of this exercise; given that I'm not inclined to get terribly personal in this space, it's worth noting that something cracked my shell enough that I felt the need to write about it somewhere and do my best/worst to pretend it wasn't freaking me out to the extent that it actually was.
And as a reward for reading all that, please accept this embedded Youtube video of Jamaican jazz pianist Monty Alexander playing "No Woman, No Cry" with his trio. This video makes me happy, and I hope it brings a smile to your face as well. It's also a valuable if somewhat limited lesson on turning "modern" "pop" music into something which works in a "jazz" setting.
I am mostly relieved. Perhaps this is a passing thing related to the issues listed above or perhaps it's a semipermanent quirk of my physiology. That the escalation of my heart rate when standing vs. sitting seems to decrease proportionate with the amount of time since I last went to the gym made sense (and I went tonight, so hoo boy), but the fact that the return to what I'd consider "normal" seems to play out over several days continues to be weird.
On the other hand it's worth noting that without going into details there have been a number of occasions in the past two years when I've been seized by sudden physical exhaustion, shortness of breath, pounding heart, and general malaise, and at those times my confident self diagnosis was: "You're fat, [Medrawt]. This is what happens to fat people who overextend themselves physically." Having an apparent measurable symptom (even though I never felt anything wrong, which was its own psychological assault on what was my increasingly and ludicrously fragile state, the notion that my body was betraying me not once [by not even being healthy enough to handle the task of my making it healthier] but twice [by not giving me any indication that anything was wrong when IT SO CLEARLY WAS {not}] - there's a bunch of conditions that I guess have been melodramatically dubbed "the silent killer," and I became afraid of most of them [not of ovarian cancer]) wow that was a long parenthetical but I'm not going back to edit my approach to this sentence: having an apparent measurable symptom made me recontextualize those events into evidence of some deeper malaise, when the more reasonable course of behavior (dead mother notwithstanding) would've been to consider said measurable physical symptom and render the diagnosis: "You're fat, [Medrawt]. This is what happens to fat people who overextend themselves physically."
So I'm almost certainly fine and I kind of wish I hadn't posted the prior, er, post, but I think that kind of retroactive self-editing is inimical to the spirit of this exercise; given that I'm not inclined to get terribly personal in this space, it's worth noting that something cracked my shell enough that I felt the need to write about it somewhere and do my best/worst to pretend it wasn't freaking me out to the extent that it actually was.
And as a reward for reading all that, please accept this embedded Youtube video of Jamaican jazz pianist Monty Alexander playing "No Woman, No Cry" with his trio. This video makes me happy, and I hope it brings a smile to your face as well. It's also a valuable if somewhat limited lesson on turning "modern" "pop" music into something which works in a "jazz" setting.
posted by medrawt at
00:09
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