I saw my heart on a monitor today. It was beating away, keeping me alive. I got to watch the red, blue, and yellow flashes of my blood flow while Emily, the technician, took still photos to show my cardiologist. Green doesn’t mean go here, and red doesn’t mean stop. Red and blue are indications of speed and tell Emily if the blood is flowing towards her or away. It’s mostly all red and blue, but the flashes of yellow are where the blood is flowing fastest, speeding through the valves of my heart. The grayish image on the screen doesn’t look like hearts on television or the movies. The more I watch the more clear it becomes, but it reminds me of the last time I had a sonogram. I was pregnant with my daughter, though in the first sonogram I didn’t know what sex she was, only that there was a baby growing inside me and there she was with her first cardiac movement fluttering on the screen. Her heart so fast it sounded like a hummingbird’s heart. The first rhythm we hear is our mother’s heart, you think you don’t remember it, right? The first time I laid my head over my first husband’s heart that thick, even beat panicked me. It sounded wrong to me, not soothing, not right. I would talk to my grandmother later and find out that my mother had a heart murmur, and when I laid across my then husband’s chest I’d been listen for that thump-whoosh, not thump-thump-thump of my ex-husband’s heart. I had no way to know about my mother’s heart murmur, no one had ever spoken it aloud to me, but I knew the sound of my mother’s heartbeat, because it had been the music that had soothed me to sleep for nine months.
My heart today sounds slow, thick, in some spots deep bass, then Emily moves the wand to another spot and suddenly my heart sounds like like a frog, with a two tone sound higher pitched, as if my heart still holds a piece of the marshes and swamps that our ancestors crawled out of to come onto land all those millions of years ago. I ask, why it sounds so different, and it’s different valves in my heart. Nothing sounds like my husband’s sure, thick heartbeat against the my ear when I lay my head on his chest as we’re falling asleep at a night. By the time we married a second time I’d grown accustomed to the sound of a healthy heart against my ear.
I listen to the push and pull and flow of my heart, sound to sound, spring frog croak, deep bass rhythm, water pushed through a rock crevice like a spring coming to the surface of the earth and spilling out into a trickle of water. My grandfather would walk down from his wooden cabin every day to get water from a spring on his land. It was this tiny pulse of water, clear and cold spilling into a small pool and then seeping away into the grass and down another crevice going back under ground. He made his coffee with that water every morning, even though he had a well for the house. That water tasted metallic heavy with minerals, the water from the spring tasted clean, no iron taste to it at all even though the spring and the well weren’t that far apart from each other. I always wondered if the spring flowed into the same aquifer as the well water was drawn from, did that clear, cold, bright taste go back under and mix with some larger underground reservoir and get lost in all the rocks and roots that flavored the well? Or did the spring flow into yet another body of water hidden beneath our feet and stay clean and sweet?
I stared at the screen today and wondered if my blood stayed clear and sweet and healthy, or if my doctor would find that somewhere in me was a root of something not so sweet. The thought scared me, so I forced myself to ask technician Emily more questions about hearts, blood flow, valves, sounds, and how all that thick muscled certainty kept beating. I asked academic questions like I was back in Human Anatomy in college, though I’d never asked many questions about the heart, except enough to help me memorize the parts of it. I’d never seen it as anything more wonderful than the bones, or any other part of the body. it was just something to memorize for the test to come. I hadn’t seen the body I was sitting in as anything that special. Watching my heart on the screen today it seemed special, not just because it was mine, in my living chest, but because it was fascinating watching it work, and thinking that’s inside me, that’s my heart. I realized that all hearts were this amazing. If I had ever had today’s epiphany back in college maybe I’d have stayed with premed classes for my biology degree, but it had been dry work back then, not as interesting as birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, or my own stories. I’d seen one film in school of an open heart surgery, and the moment they used the big shears to cut through the sternum it made a sound, wet and sharp as the bone was cut. I don’t know what it was about that particular sound, but my eyes rolled back in my head and I started to sink down to my desk with another girl beside me. Then the teacher was there screaming in our faces, “If you faint no one will give you their notes. No one!” We rallied and didn’t faint, but that took care of any thoughts I might have had about majoring in medicine as my undergrad degree. If I couldn’t make it through a film of an operation, well, the real thing would surely put me on the floor, but today for the first time I wasn’t sure of that. If I had known the heart was this … alive, vibrant, literally the heart of the matter. I might have tried my luck at hearing that wet, sharp, terrible sound in person just to see this living muscle in our chests that keeps us alive. It was an epiphany moment, like another dream come to knock on my door, but it’s not loud enough to derail my life. I make a living from writing. Okay, more than that. I am a best selling novelist. I’ve hit #1 more than once. I’ve succeeded beyond my wildest dreams when I was in college. Biology had always seemed the road less traveled for me, but today I listened to the inner workings of my own heart and realized that there were other possibilities had I been inspired at the right time. Now, instead of changing my major I sit down at my desk and I write. I share what happened today with you here. I’ll finish this then get back to working on my forty-fifth novel.