To Adam Anderson: God Hates You

Sunday night I could not sleep.  After returning to Chicago late that night, my heart was inexplicably pounding with an occasional arrhythmia.  This extraordinarily uncomfortable feeling only induced an ever building anxiety preventing me from sleeping, which only caused me to notice more and more arrhythmias, until probably 10% of heartbeats were arrhythmic.  Feeling understandably concerned about the matter--and unable to sleep--I spent some time Googling cardiac arrhythmias.  If you try this out, you'll quickly find out that doing so is rather terrifying.  Somehow, though, I was able to calm down and fall asleep.

The next day began fine until midday when I was machining some plastic for a scale model of the Double Chooz outer veto.  The incessant grinding of the band saw through plastic did not ease my angst over the mounting  arrhythmias and palpitations. When the chest pains hit, I was convinced that I was having a heart attack.  As I was heading out the door to go to the emergency room, I talked to my mother who tried to convince me that the episode was merely a panic attack.  Apparently my father had similar episodes well over a dozen times: he thought he was going to die, had palpitations, and simply could not relax for hours and hours.  Calmed slightly, I felt a little better and went back to work.

As the day wore on, however, I could not concentrate, and I left early.  I tried eating dinner with Ben (who was probably totally befuddled by my incoherent state), which worked a little, but I was still periodically beset by pangs of extreme panic.  I talked to my parents for awhile, but it became clear around 1:30am that there was no hope of sleeping or avoiding the doom of cardiac arrest--at least in my panic-stricken mental state.

So, I went to the emergency room at the University of Chicago.

While the emergency room is a very good place to go if you think that you are having a heart attack, it is probably the worst place in the world to go if you are having a panic attack.  True, they quickly take your vital information and give you an electrocardiogram.  But they only do this so that they can correctly determine your position in the line of patients waiting for medical help.  And since I wasn't actually having a heart attack, I was stuck at the back of the line.

One nice feature of the ERs on the South Side of Chicago is that they are populated with colorful characters.  Between squirming from my rapid arrhythmia and palpitation, and biting my nails from anxiety, I had the pleasure of listening to some local kids jovially chatting about how "motherfuckin' bitch" Y stabbed "motherfucker" X to death a few months ago.  The stories of their sexual exploits were equally impressive.  It was reassuring to know that they weren't judgmental: if you were a motherfucker already, then murdering someone with your bare hands just made you a bitch. I mean, that's a label that even I could handle.

So after listening to this fascinating conversation in the waiting room for the 4.5 hours between 1:30am and 6:00am, the ER staff finally made it to the bottom of the list.  I went through the double doors.  My bed was surrounded by those lovely hanging curtains with reassuring prints on them.  This one had leaves and twigs.  Lovely, I thought, very lovely.  As I lay down and the nurse left, I was assailed with the reassuring screaming of the woman to my right.  "Lord have mercy! Lord have mercy! My pancreas is killin' me! Doctor I'm dyin'!  I am DYIN'"  She repeated this for at least 20 minutes because she was one of those annoying patients who keeps coming back the ER with nothing actually wrong with her.  The doctors had nothing to do but listen to her scream--and chuckle with their graduate students.  On my left I heard the nurses setting up a bowl on the floor so that the patient could both vomit and urinate without ever having to move.  Well, this was it, I thought.  They have put in the place where people go to die.

The doctors then sent in their first line of defense: the graduate student.  Not the graduate student!  I didn't need the damn graduate student, I thought, I needed the doctor.  But in spite of his lesser experience and presumably his exhaustion at 6am, he was very smart and talking with him and his general cheerfulness was probably the most useful thing that anyone did for me there.  He'll be a terrific doctor someday.

After he consulted with his superiors, they sent in the second line of defense: the resident.  Apparently neither he nor the graduate student could find anything wrong with my EKG or vitals, but they would to a chest x-ray to double check.

And the final line of defense--the actual doctor--interrupted to ask how tall I was.  6' 1" I responded.  She laughed. Tall people aorta problems, she said.  Who would have known?

So the grumpy x-ray man wheeled his x-ray machine over and took a film of my chest.  The woman started to scream again.  A few snippets of conversation drifted in from the doctors and graduate students outside.  "Chest x-ray...", "congestive heart failure", I thought I heard.  I looked over at my heart monitor and my pulse had jumped from 72 to 85.  I was going to die again.

But there was no problem.  Everything was normal.  I signed the discharge papers.  I asked for sedatives or anti-anxiety medication, but they refused.  I can hardly remember why.  I left at 8:20am.  I had been awake for 25 hours.

When I went home, it was still there, that violent palpitating beating of my heart.  Exhaustion pulled me to sleep.

I slept all day and went to the Jeff Koons exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  It was excellent.  I wandered aimlessly around Lincoln Park for an hour.  I rented a movie from iTunes, trying to calm down.  Slowly, very slowly I did.  I'm still not calm though.  But I won't die.  I won't even have a heart attack.  In fact, I'm probably in flawless health.  After some more cardiological tests, we shall see for certain.