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October 04, 2006
I try my best to be just like I am
Well, lordy. Turns out I wasn't actually seeing a *cardiologist* today, I was going to the *cardiologist's office* to have procedures done. Depending on the results, I'll either follow up with my regular doctor, or see the specialist. I suppose that makes sense, but I always find "procedures" irritating, because the folks who do them will never tell me anything useful. I had an echocardiogram, about which I know nothing much yet (although my heart did at least cooperate by being speedy in the office; my pulse went up to 104 while she was recording). At least the tech didn't gasp and run out of the room and bring back a doctor, so I'm figuring nothing was spectacularly wrong.
Then the tech wired me up with a Holter monitor. I'm trying to concentrate on how neat it is that I can have a 24-hour recording made of my heart without having to spend a night in the hospital, but I'm only human, and I have to admit: It's kind of bothersome. Here's what it looks like:
Sexy, eh?
I finished the Pema Chödrön book, and I'm going to wait a few days and reread it, since I think I need to let the lessons from it sink in better than they did on a single reading. It's been especially pertinent stuff. I just had another self-help-ish book recommended to me, Feeling Good, and I've picked up a copy and am going to give it a look-see. Turns out I'm not the first person who's gotten to a no-more-talk-therapy point.
I suppose I've been realizing that I'm not the first person to feel *any* of the things I've been feeling lately, which has been really grounding. This is how people feel. For nearly 3,000 years. Just like this. We fall in and out of love, we sustain losses, we obsess over the things that fret us, we resist change.
Crazy. My life experience has been of thinking of myself as weird and unique and different and sui generis; it's a brain-fuck to think of myself as *just like everyone else*. But very, very calming.
Posted by Rose at October 4, 2006 01:59 PM
Comments
Kind of related to your last few paragraphs:
"Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is." -- Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Not to discount your experiences in the least, it's just something I've been thinking about lately as well.
I will respond to your email tonight - I'm not ignoring you; I don't have access to that account from work.
Posted by: valerie at October 6, 2006 10:53 AM