ACT 3: HEART IN THE RIGHT PLACE

Open with a shot of the modern façade of Children’s Hospital, with its colorful child-friendly decoration, looming in front of us.  The ambulance pulls into a spot in front of the ER door and I leap out, still clutching my knapsack.  I race to the rear of the vehicle, hungry for the sight of my son’s face.  The big doors open like cemetery gates and there he is, white-faced and somehow small. 

“The ambulance was fun,” he croaks.

More chirping coming from my knapsack reminds me I’ve been ignoring the sound of the cellphone my son had entrusted to me in the ER.  I pull out the phone, see the text-message signal.  I flip it open. 

“Wow, you have twelve text messages!”

“What do they say?”

“The first one’s from Matt.  It says, Are you OK?  The next is Kelly, What’s wrong?  Wait -- How do they all know you’re sick?”

“My iTouch.  I changed my Facebook status to ‘In the ER.’”

And we laugh – heartily.

That night in Children’s Hospital, my husband and I squeeze into the tiny one-parent cot in our son’s room in the Cardiac Care Unit.  As the snow begins to fall outside the window, we lie on the hard cushion, watching G. sleep soundly despite all the electrodes all over his body, hooked up to a computer in the hallway outside his room, so the nurse can check his vitals without even entering his room. 

The next day, a technician wheels in a large contraption with a screen, an ultrasound machine.  She jokes with us as she lathers up our son's chest with cold ointment.  We're going to watch a new cable channel, The G’s Heart Channel. 

The shadowy image that appears on the screen reminds me of my very first sight of this same child as a tiny fetus, an ultrasound taken 14 years ago.  I gasp. 

The technician points out the valves and chambers.  The little gray lump, the size of a small frog, thumps on the screen in front of us, exposed.  How can something so small hold all the vastness I feel in my own chest?

“Your heart is structurally healthy,” the cardiologist addresses G. as Bart and I sigh with relief, “I think what you have is a short circuit.”  He teaches us some new words, “supraventricular tachycardia” (SVT).  From a normal heart rate of 60-100 beats per minute, G’s heart can sometimes accelerate to 300.  The attacks are painful and scary (we know that now!) but they are not lethal.  In fact, this condition is quite common and not that serious!  G. will go home with a Remote Episode Recorder, or Holter monitor, which he will carry with him as he continues his normal activities.  (The doctor says we should warn the school “so they don’t call Homeland Security.”) 

For the next several months, every time our son has an attack, he turns on the monitor, records his heart rate, calls an 800 number and transmits the recording to the hospital.  We soon discover that he's having attacks of extremely high heart rates, as often as three times a week.  There's also another ambulance ride, and another ER.

The end of the story is that my son is alive and well.  The only “better place” he went was Children’s Hospital. 

Early one February morning, with yet more snow hovering in the air, we return to Children’s for his cardiac ablation procedure.  It is performed by cardiac catheter, through an incision in his thigh.  The electrophysiologist (who tells my son, "I'm really just a fancy electrician") induces an SVT attack, maps the electrical circuitry of my son's heart, then uses heat to burn away the unnecessary electrical charge.  The whole thing takes about 4 hours.  It is like something out of "Star Trek."  

Our son goes home the same day, groggy and nauseous, just as the snowflakes begin to fall.  And although there have been moments when he reported his heart trembling on the edge, almost as if the SVT were starting (the doctor calls them ‘phantom pains’), he has never had any episodes since the procedure.  The following summer he goes on a second canoe trip to Canada.  He plays soccer and rides his bike.  And that ambulance ride last December feels very far away. 

But something has changed, and here I depart from my medical drama format.  After a few weeks I return to my relaxed, take-it-in-stride style, but I've learned the future is never certain.  We never know what the next heartbeat might bring, or how quickly.  You might think this knowledge would make me anxious -- but it doesn’t.  Instead, I feel liberated.

Because I experienced something in that exam room that night.  Like my son’s symptoms, this experience is hard to put into words.  It is something that causes me to wonder and to ponder.   I was not afraid.  The fear hit me later, in the ambulance, in the hospital, when I looked back at what had happened.  But in the ER, I was not afraid.  I was not aware of any thoughts, memories or fears.  I was calm, wide awake, sensing, watching, listening, my feet solidly on the ground. 

I felt – what can I call it? 

Trust. 

Trust in the size of the human heart.  Surrounded and buoyed by the kindness of people around me, supported by the Being we all share, I found out I can trust my own heart to be spacious enough to encompass all the pain and love and gratitude of a lifetime -- and still keep on beating, in this moment, in this place.

Final scene.  Back home from Children’s Hospital I flop onto the sofa beside my son.  “Wow, that was something, huh, kid?”

“Yeah.  It was just like one of those doctor shows on TV,” my very wise son says, with a look of wonderment on his face, “except I was in it.”

And so was I.