Wired

I'm wired, literally, for the next few weeks. Why? A few weeks ago I started having some disconcerting symptoms. I waited and they didn't go away. I cut down the coffee and they didn't go away. I decided that activities like playing with my cat or walking from the garage to my building shouldn't give me palpitations, chest pain, and light headedness.

In all probability, it's just this friggin' drug I have to take. If I stop the drug, I stop digesting my food, start passing out from intestinal cramping, and lose more weight. The problem is, it can cause some not so great cardiac side effects sometimes. Sounds like one of those catch 22 things, doesn't it? My choices may well be digest or fibrillate. Hence I am wired to a gadget called a cardiac event monitor. It's a non-invasive and relatively cheap test that can help identify or rule out transient arrhythmia.

It's not horrible. The cons: I feel stupid wearing it. You need to call in "events" on a corded phone. The sticky parts are itchy. It makes god awful screechy noises when it's recording and playing back. And it's high tech circa Atari 2600.

(Guess which one I'm wearing!)

Here's how it works. The gadget has two electrodes that connect to sticky pads on your chest (like a two lead EKG). You push a button on the gadget to record your heart rhythm when you are having symptoms (an "event"). It screeches and whines and records your heart rhythm for something like the next minute. Then you call the testing company on a corded phone and tell the operator at the testing company you have an "event" to send. They make a note of what your symptoms were and what you were doing when they started. You then play the "event" recording into the mouthpiece of the phone. The phone with a cord. Doesn't it seem like we should have some slighty more advanced form of data transmission?

I guess some kind of noise serves a purpose. I suspect elderly folks who are the most frequent users of these gadgets need the immediate feedback that something is happening when they hit the record button. If it did its job in silent efficiency, they might think it was broken and keep hitting the button. But I gotta say, a less ear splitting noise would be, well, better. My cell phone can play Ode to Joy but my event monitor has to sound like a retro modem played through a bullhorn.

So yesterday I had a strange moment with the test center operator. I was cleaning my apartment when I had an "event". I sat down and recorded, then I called.

"And what were you doing?" the operator asked.
"Housework" I said.
"Well, no more of that!" she said lightly "You'll have to tell your husband to do it himself!" She actually giggled when she said that last part.
This gave me pause. Does a woman doing housework somehow imply that she is married? Do people believe women do not clean their homes if they don't have a hubby to clean for? I wanted to ask her this and several other things.
Instead I said "That might be hard since we're divorced"

Then I played the screeching noises that will be transformed, through the wonders of cutting edge 1970s' technology, into a rhythm strip on the other end of the phone.

Assuming I'm not having some life threatening arrhythmia or something (which you'd think would be obvious by the being passed out or dead), I won't hear about the results for a while. If it 's not bad on the heart front, we either say "fuck it" and I put up with it or we discuss stuff that's worse than wearing than a screeching atari-like gadget and reporting symptoms to June Cleaver. So for now, I'll just sit tight, record and send my "events", and imagine I'm blasting all those nasty aliens before they take out my missile bases.