EchoPandemonioGram

Tomorrow I go in and have my first post-recovery echocardiogram, which amounts of a fairly sophisticated ultrasound of the heart (they can even tell by Doppler analysis which way one's blood is flowing and color it appropriately).

Why does this test make me so anxious? It's not as though it hurts. The hardest part of having an echocardiogram is not giggling when they smear cold tranducer grease on your chest, and there's some cleaning up afterwards before you can put your shirt on. The worst case, if they do a contrast echocardiogram, is that they'll fit me with an IV by which they can introduce contrast medium (dye or frothy saline) into my bloodstream. So there's no risk of pain or injury, no small-but-nonzero chance of a stroke, no cutting and breaking of ribs.

So why does it make me a little anxious? Because I want a good result. I've been through a lot since the heart attack - surgery, drugs, diet, rehab, quitting smoking, exercise - and I want all of that effort to be shown to be worthwhile. I want my heart to be reasonably healthy so I can stop thinking about it all the time, so I don't have to analyze every twinge in my chest and decide if I think I'm having a heart attack or if it was just the tamales acting up. I want to stop being a heart attack and open heart surgery survivor and go back to being the person I used to be (though hopefully a thinner, more fit, nonsmoking version of the person I used to be).

I don't want them to look at my heart and find it enlarged and weak, with a poor ejection fraction and lots of regurgitation and turbulence caused by leaking valves, stricken with cardiomyopathy and about halfway down the road to congestive heart failure. I don't want that. I really don't want that. I want my heart to have shown signs of healing and improvement. I want all the stuff I've been through to mean something. It would suck if I went through all of that and just got worse.

But I don't think I am worse. I don't honestly think my heart is in bad shape, all things considered. At the very least, it's no worse than it was back before last July. But until they actually tell me the results of the test, I'm going to be a little anxious about it. I fully expect to have a good result - but until I actually hear the words, well, I'm going to fret, just a little.

And now, back to my regularly-scheduled BS.