Weird Science

My recovery from the abdominal surgery was fairly routine, nothing much to write home about. I think I'll go a little further back in time to 2005 when I had my first health scare. I was a sickly kid pretty much from birth. I always had something weird: unusual skin disorders, faulty bladder valves, scarlet fever, etc. I also had all the geeky health problems that likely contributed to my lonely, friendless days in elementary school. I was the kid with post-nasal drip, astigmatism, hay fever and scoliosis. Factor those gems in with my unusually advanced vocabulary, penchant for correcting spelling and grammar and love for Nick-at-Nite, I wasn't asked to a lot of sleep-overs. My childhood, however, is a post for another day.

Once I hit 17 or so, I stopped getting sick all the time and was pretty much healthy as a horse until 2005. It was then that I started getting night sweats, vertigo and heart palpitations. My body is incredibly odd in its functioning and one of the weirder attributes is my heartbeat and blood pressure. I have tiny, infant sized veins that are prone to collapse when a needle is anywhere near them. I should have higher than normal blood pressure just due to the minuscule size of my veins. Not so. My blood pressure is always very low, even under the most extreme circumstances (stress, contractions, full on labor). My heartbeat is slow and hard to find. I'm convinced that I'm at least 1/4 dead, but this has yet to be medically proven. So, when my heart started racing and feeling...well, the only way I can describe it is effervescent, I was a more than a little concerned.

At this time I was a patient at a ancient doctor's office (by that I mean both the doctor and the office were ancient). The medical equipment looked to be out of an episode of Dr. Kildare. I was told that I needed to be hooked up to a Holter Monitor for 24 hours to check my heart beats. Ok, sounds fair. What I was hooked up to looked suspiciously like the Panasonic cassette player that I received from Santa in 1987. I was basically taped to a small boombox and had 10 sticky pads with wires on various points on my body. So many questions ran through my head. Not the least of which was wondering where the hell they found cassette tapes in 2005. I hadn't seen them in stores for years. They either had a whole stockpile of them or had a secret DeLorean making trips back to 1985.

Once I was hooked up and looking fully like an 8th grade science project, I was sent on my way. Somehow I survived my 24 hour torture and came back the next day to be unhooked, unstickered and de-taped.