A Cardiologist Visit

Until just the other day, I had not seen my cardiologist since back in February. That was when a heart monitor was inserted under the skin on my chest. The MD had examined the structure of my heart by having me drink a radioactive fluid and watching how it circulated through my heart while resting and again after walking on a treadmill. He had thought my heart looked strong. In fact, he had told me that, although my chart said I was eighty-four years old, he thought my entire appearance was more like a sixty something guy.

Because of the irregularities of my pulse, he wanted me to wear a heart monitor and to get twenty-four-hour readings of my pulse. Since that insertion, I had only seen a nurse practitioner once and she had shown me some of the output of the monitor.

I was very interested to have this current meeting with my cardiologist. Maybe I’d hear something about the blood samples and skin samples he had taken earlier, too. His nurse that morning had listened to my heart and lungs through my shirt, but I took off that shirt for the cardiologist. I figured he would want to feel the spot where the monitor was located. Part of the directions that came with the thing was about not mashing it or resting on it causing it to tear through more fascia and change its placement. I had been told that the thing – about the size of a thumb drive – had been inserted in the best place to record electrical and audio signals from my heart. Don’t make it move!

I had liked the MD’s factual approach. This time, he said the same thing his nurse had said earlier: my blood pressure was good, but my heartbeat was irregular. Slow, too. The slow had been there for a long time. I thought that was because of my being a runner. As I expected, the guy reached to touch my heart monitor, and remarked that it seemed to be okay. It was sending signals as expected.

I waited while he turned through some pages in my chart. After a moment, he folded some back and sat there, seeming to be reading one of them. Then, he turned to me. “When did you start shaving?”

I probably snorted and squirmed a little. What did this have to do with my heart rhythm? For sure, having only a little facial hair had been a source of some embarrassment and maybe even shame when I was a teen. But I told him. “When I was a freshman and sophomore at the University of Alabama, I shaved on Tuesdays and Thursdays for ROTC, and I shaved before a date. I probably could have gotten away without shaving for ROTC on Thursdays. Maybe even on some Tuesdays, too. Why do you ask?”

He didn’t answer right away. He sat there for a while not looking at me. And neither of us said anything. I waited. Did I have some ailment related to all this that he was getting the courage to tell me? Then he looked up. Looked me straight in the eye. Here it comes.

“Your symptoms suggest you have a very mild form of anageria.”

I didn’t hesitate. “You make this sound pretty serious. I hope you are going to talk more about this … what did you call it? And what can I expect?”

For the next fifteen minutes or so, he taught me a little bit about human biology. And he gave me his prognosis. He paused, waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. I was puzzling about what to do when you have just learned from an MD something that is going to be with you for the rest of your life?

As he started folding up my chart, he told me to see him again in six months. He added that he didn’t think we were going to learn much from that heart monitor, but it was not worth the trouble to cut it out. Just before he walked out, he turned back to me. “I retire in seven more years. I’ll put my diagnosis in your folder. Whoever sees you after me will be able to see the papers.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

As I was putting my shirt back on, I resolved that when I got home, I was going to search through old boxes of family photos. I found two related photos. One was taken by my uncle that summer when I was working for the Dallas County Highway Engineers between my sophomore and junior years in college. The other was after I finished my PhD and was about to go into the Army.

These were photos of a twenty-one-year-old student and an about-to-be twenty-seven-year-old soldier. Too much was going on by that time for me to pay much attention to my too clean face. Now, it is different. Now I understand those photos a little better.

MEDICAL NOTE: Anageria has been known since 2017. It was first described in a book titled How to Stop Time. There, the author lists others who have had this malady and told some of the ways it affected their lives. Google summarizes what is known.