Heart Attack

2000

That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life.

A small cramp in my left bicep.

That’s unusual. I’ve never had a cramp there.

It sharpens, spider-webbing into my shoulder.

I flex my arm and try to work it out, but my left arm feels uncoordinated.

Once, when I was seventeen, I was sprinting in a social game of football when both my calves cramped so badly I fell to the ground. But I’d been sprinting. And I’d been at a party the previous night and had drank, so I was likely dehydrated. Those cramps had causes.

Surely my arm shouldn’t just cramp like that, should it?

Unless the cause isn’t something muscular, and the cramp is just the symptom.

Like with a heart attack. That possibility might not be a realization but an epiphany. Heart attacks come with pain in the left arm – I don’t know why, but I know they do.

And my heart … There. My heartbeat’s quicker. Harder … I think. I’m unsure. I don’t know what it’s meant to be like. Normally, you don’t notice your heartbeat. But I do now, and it feels fast and hard.

The cramping is tightening. I flex my arm. Stretch. Try to work the cramp out. But every motion only exacerbates the pain.

I’m too young to have a heart attack.

That’s the logical counter. This is anxiety. I know it’s anxiety. I’m certain it’s anxiety. Heart attacks are the demesne of older people. I’m young and fit – well, relatively fit, although I’ve smoked for years. Maybe the smoking’s caused heart disease. The doubt worms in.

Maybe it’s not heart disease. Maybe I have some congenital heart defect. That happens to people, and it can cause problems – like a heart attack – regardless of age.

I’ve unwittingly but stubbornly worked a heart attack into the realm of possibility, and that possibility’s swelling into a certainty because the cramps are growing worse, and my heart’s pounding harder.

I should call a hospital. Need to call a hospital. This is a heart attack. It’s a heart attack. A heart attack.

A fucking heart attack.

But what if I go to hospital and they find it’s not a heart attack? Once, when I was eighteen, my breath began to catch in my throat. I tried to prove to myself that I could breathe, taking big gulps. Then my breath grew shorter and shorter until I felt I couldn’t breathe at all. So I was rushed to hospital. A sympathetic doctor explained I’d made myself hyperventilate.

I take a slow, deep breath – gasp for it – but don’t feel it work its way through my lungs. That’s another symptom of a heart attack. Well, I think it is. Well, I don’t know. But in movies, in TV shows, when people have heart attacks, they complain of breathlessness.

I’m done.

I can’t win this through sheer will.

I find my meds and take half a Xanax. If this is a heart attack, the Xanax won’t do much. But within fifteen minutes, the cramp in my left arm has eased. Sedatives work as muscle relaxants, so this result could be a misnomer. But then my heart rates slows back to normal. Surely, a Xanax wouldn’t arrest a heart attack.

There.

The fear subsides. The panic dulls. It’s easier to detach now.

Within another fifteen minutes, that sedative peacefulness immerses me.

Heart attack: no.

Anxiety: yes.

I store that in my head.

Next time, I remember this.

Next time, I can’t let it get this far.

I’m confident in my vows.

But I know confidence means nothing if this comes again.