Awareness

So… I have a heart monitor now.

Yeah – not quite as serious it sounds, but I love the drama. LOL. It’s a little tool that’s about the size of a pda cell phone and it has 4 silver leads on it, a record button and a play button. And at various times through out the day, I am to put it to my chest, making sure all the leads touch and press record. A series of tones go off and eventually mimic while recording the beating of my heart. When it’s done, it sounds off and then I have to call a phone number to transmit said recording. They ask me for my name and if I was experiencing any symptoms when using it. I’ve done it a few times now… and what I realize is that no matter what my heart begins doing, it ends up doing something wildly different. If I’ve put the machine to my chest and it was racing, or skipping, or my chest was feeling generally tight – which it does a lot these days, the beeps will whistle away following my heart beat, but as I tune into it… it slows down…. normalizes…. until the symptoms subside. I know that’s not the initial purpose of the tool, but it’s pretty cool that it’s a byproduct. It makes me aware of the (usually undue) stress on my body and my heart and forces me to quietly repair before it gets any worse.

I have it for about 7 days so my Doctor (who is the BOMB by the way – Dr. Llobet – look him upon ZocDoc.com) can have a more complete picture on what’s happening to my heart. He took an echo cardiogram (sonogram of the heart) so as to have the visual picture and this Micro ER will give him the “electrical” picture. Because you know when you actually sit in the doctors’ office… whatever you had going wrong wants to act right when the machines are on you. So this is a way to catch it when it’s misbehaving.

I’ve become increasingly aware of a number of things lately. Primarily, how much my mother has changed. And how unlike her I am now – when all I did was to strive to be LIKE her. But that’s nothing new. I’ve blogged about that before. The thing that’s been toasting my noodle lately… and maybe – i turned a blind eye to it before… is how very close she is still with my uncle. THAT uncle. Close enough that his 1 visit every other week weighs more than my one visit every other day. Close enough that when he visits, she opens up and chats away like nothing is wrong, but outside of the stray order to do this or that, she hasn’t anything to say to me. Close enough that he can offer her advice that I may have presented verbatim just minutes before – but his words hold more weight. And this awareness is unseating a whole lot of everything in my mind and heart. Shaking the very foundation of things I KNEW to be true.

Here’s what I know and maintain. If ANYONE… ANYONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD: family, friend, stranger … doesn’t matter… EVER touches my child… and I find out about it… It’s jailtime for me. Jailtime or the grave. That’s the bottom line. I have to concede that this person may be big enough to kill me in the process… but the surge of anger I feel thinking about it TODAY – where I have no kids… I can only imagine will be magnified by that love I hear parents talk about. That all encompassing all consuming love that they can’t grasp. I won’t even look for a weapon. I’ll do it with my bare hands.

Then… i compare that to what was done when folks in my family “found out” (I ended up finally deciding to tell them after 4 years of being convinced that it was a good secret to keep and I shouldn’t share with anyone. *sigh* what confusion for a little kid.) It was tantamount to sweeping it under the rug. It was a mere 5 years before he was 100% accepted back into the fold of the family and now he holds a certain premium in my mom’s mind… over me. I can’t say that I can really articulate for the reader what that does to the foundation of everything I THOUGHT to be true. Cause Grandma knew… and did nothing. They claimed to NOT tell my Dad for fear of his rage… and all my life I held on to the idea that my Dad would have been the one to … avenge what happened to me. He was the keeper of my integrity. But in hindsight… maybe he would have done nothing too. If the two people I placed highest in this world (mom & gramma) were willing to just… blow it off… why did I think Dad would come to the rescue? and Domi? Well… he’s only 4 years older than me. What could I have really expected from a 12 year old? But he does maintain his displeasure with that uncle to this day. At least he’s consistent.

It’s like that time while you’re learning about Philosophical Theories and they ask you how you know when you sit in the chair it will actually sustain your weight and hold you up. And your response is something like, “well, cause you know it will”… and then you have that one experience where a chair breaks from a pressure on a fault or… the chair was slid away from you and where you thought it was… it wasn’t. And it sure hurt (your body and your pride) like hell to fall. You kinda wanna double check every chair from that point forward.

Or just not sit down.

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