Day 78; Kind Hearts and Lost Crowns

Wednesday was warmer than it has been, and I felt like wearing a skirt. When I am nervous I tend to dress a little more formally than usual. Perhaps this is a sign that you're half-way to being an idiot, but I find it reassuring and somewhat distracting to be in fancier clothes I rarely wear. I put on my tweed pencil skirt from LK Bennett in London, black satin Isaac Mizrahi (pre-Target) knee-high boots, a midnight blue v-neck sweater and silver geometric necklace.

I was going to see my new cardiologist.

Hopped out the door and was at 60th Street in something like 10 minutes--living near the B train is fabulous--though I wish it didn't have those bench-like seats that made my tweeded ass slide all over the place. Soon I was sitting in a doctor's office on the 10th floor, thumbing my way through an article on Michelle Obama (NOTE: Please quit with the "Mom-In-Chief" stuff--I know you needed to tone down the smarts for the election, but let's see that Harvard mind at work, please. You could help to de-Palinize the public opinion of professional women!)

I'd already had an ekg that confirmed that, yup, I still have right bundle branch blockage. Small beans, and I'm lucky it's the right, not the left, because that goes under the description of 'cardiac pathology'. My cholesterol apparently is kick-ass, so the next bit was to proceed to the electro-cardiogram.

Nothin' says welcome to the holiday season like having your naked chest lubed up! I lay there on the table, in the blue paper gown, and watched the tissue of my heart flutter on the monitor. It was a curiously relaxing experience, apart from the moments when he dug the little nodule deep between my ribs. Echocardio technology has improved, certainly since my last experience, and the cardiologist was pretty certain that I'd had a false diagnosis of mitral valve prolapse--it was a fashionable diagnosis for a while, and I also have the right appearance for it, being a small, slender woman. I thought of my first cardiologist, a solemn yet wry monkey-faced man at Northwestern General in Chicago: I didn't see him being influenced by fashionable diagnoses. And sure enough, there it was, a little bend in the valve but no leakage or backwash. Otherwise my poor little alchohol-soaked heart looked "pristine".

That, children, is the power of cardiovascualar exercise. I went one with my day, literally feeling light hearted. . .until later that night, when eating an apparently challenging bowl of sweet potato and acorn squash soup, my temporary crown fell out.

Well, of course it did.