There Were No Spiders

 “The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” - Marcus Aurelius                                                                                                                     (A stump in my backyard)

A couple weeks ago I had my two-year follow-up with my cardiologist, Dr. Wood, and she asked if I would like to see the digital recording of the angiogram of my dissection from the night I was rushed up to the cath lab from the emergency department. Yes! Absolutely! It had never occurred to me to ask or that a live recording even existed. I had relied on my imagination to make sense of the trauma, and relying on imagination is not the best idea to process an event of SCAD magnitude. 

The imagination is a notorious braggart, if not an outright liar.  It loves to stir up the pot of angst and drag the mind (and heart, if you're not careful) into a hyperbolic stew and drop it there to simmer. It latches on to phrases such as: "You had a classic Widow Maker going on in there!" and "My God, an LAD dissection is lethal!" and "These things are usually only picked up in autopsy."  

All of these were said to me and went into the stew. My imagination stirred them and let them simmer. I pictured black widow spiders in my artery rending at the lining until it detached and cause a dam that blocked the blood flow. And later, the image of a pathologist hunkered over my cold, gray body eating a sandwich saying, "Yup, it was those damn spiders again!" 

The imagination has no boundaries. Great for creating works of art. No so trustworthy, when left on its own, in healing the mind from a medical emergency.

The actual recording of my dissection yanked the event from the dark corners of my imagination and brought it into the light of reality, the truth of science, removed the scare factor. My first reaction was, "That's it?"

There were no spiders.  My dissecting LAD was a wispy line being gently rocked like a strand of seaweed on the undulating waves of my beating heart. The abnormality was a thickening of the strand in the center of the artery that suddenly narrowed into a foggy nothingness where the dye did not reach. That was all it was. A stopped-up sink pipe. A traffic jam. A piece of lemon pulp stuck in a straw.

Things here on earth break and our bodies are among those things. Medicine has come a long way in being able to repair the breakage. The way we are built on the inside is not so different as the things we see outside, in nature. 

Seeing the recording of my SCAD in live action freed me from some of the shadowy thoughts that still lingered in my imagination. A logical connection is now solidified and my mind can now fully believe the first words my surgeon said to me after my bypass graft: "Well, we fixed you!"

I meditate quite a bit on my healthy heart and use my imagination in a positive way during this time. I picture the chambers of my heart happily beating rhythms, my arteries flowing. 

Looking at the structure of things in the natural world helps me to make sense of my SCAD. Nature is not all that original in that it duplicates patterns. Look for the structure of the heart and you will find the chambers and the arteries just about everywhere: granite intrusions in a rocky cliff, the leaf of a tree, the roots from a stump. 

Seeing the parts in nature, seeing the digital recording of my own heart, understanding the dissected piece and understanding the fix of my broken heart has helped me take the drama out and calm my mind to a place of healing. Looking squarely at the truth of our physical structure and the truth of our fix -- whatever our fix may be in this moment --  can help the mind feel whole again.