When I first started wearing my heart monitor, I thought I would lose my mind before the month ended. It was supposed to be so easy. The heart nurse assured me that it was easy to put on. The company would call me and walk me through it. I could essentially set it and forget it. She did warn me that the company had a weird name and a 1-800 number so they sounded like spam. We both laughed before I went my own merry way. Oh, and she said it would be a week or two before they contacted me. Fine. Dandy, even. I’d deal with it when it happened.
That was nearly two weeks later. I had my weekly nurse explain it to me and waited until my brother was over to set it up. It was fine and dandy until the next day when it kept saying I had poor skin contact. I thought I set the Do Not Disturb mode, but I apparently hadn’t done it properly because it kept buzzing at me every few minutes. The next day, I used a different holder for the battery because I thought maybe I had put on the first one incorrectly. That didn’t help.
I could deal with the beeping during the day (for some reason, I couldn’t completely mute the audio, which I didn’t understand. They were not a hospital or a clinic–they were just gathering the data. So why should I be notified when something went wrong? It’s not as if they could do anything about it. I guess so I could call 9-1-1 or something like that, but still.), but it was driving me batty at night. I put it in a tissue box with just the sensor sticking out, then put the tissue box in a plastic container filled with books in the corner of my room. I have a white noise machine that I turned to high and I wear earplugs while I sleep. None of this helped. It was torture.
I called the company and they verified that I was doing everything correctly. They said to just ignore the beeping, which, I mean….THAT’S WHAT I WAS TRYING TO DO. I figured out that I was being stupid about the DND mode and got it to work properly. That made things so much better until last week, which was two weeks into the monitoring. It kept saying there was poor skin contact even when I didn’t move, and I finally figured out that it was the battery case. The tape was losing its stickiness even though it was still firmly adhered to my chest. Once I changed it, I had no problems after that.
The moral of the story is that yes it’s easy if you do it right in the beginning. Wait, though. That’s not true. It was barking at me the first day even though I had placed the monitor correctly and everything. I still maintain that the part of the reason I was having such a big problem with it the first day was because it’s not made for a big-chested person. I have big cleavage (truly not a humble brag) and the heart monitor did not know what to do with that vast expanse. I especially had trouble when I was doing a floor exercise that involved me lying on my back and allowing my knees to drop one way or the other. My torso is supposed to go the other way, which means my boobs are flopping all about. The heart monitor did not like that the first day.
Which leads me to wonder how this thing was tested. (I don’t really wonder because it’s probably how most things are tested–on the “average” white male). Yes, my boobs are big, but they’re not abnormally huge. I’m a triple D or maybe the next size bigger. Again, big, but not abnormally so. Well within the range of boobage, I would think, which means the monitor should not have that much difficulty dealing with my chest. I might not have had heart issues before I wore the heart monitor, but it sure did it’s best to give me palpitations.
Now, in the last week of wearing it, I have it down to a science. I don’t check it hardly at all. I keep it on DND all the time so I don’t have to listen to it at all. Which, again, defeats the purpose of me wearing it. I mean, I know there are legit reasons for people to wear a heart monitor, but I can’t help but feel it’s a waste of time for me. My heart doc said it’s preventative, which I get. If it had been a less traumatic experience, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. However, the two or three nights where I couldn’t sleep because it was beeping every few minutes…yeah, that was not good for my heart, I’ll tell you what.
But! The main point of this post is not to complain about the heart monitor, as difficult as that may be to believe. I wouldn’t blame you as I’ve written almost a thousand words about how much I’ve hated it. The point is that I have less than a week left when I thought I wouldn’t last a week wearing it. Time, it does continue to tick on, regardless of how long or short a certain segment of time might feel. It’s trite, but it’s true. Time will continue to tick along whether we want it to or not.
I’ve been home for six weeks now from the hospital (and two days). That’s a month-and-a-half. I was in the hospital for two weeks. That’s two months in total. That’s a good chunk of time, but in my life span, it’s almost nothing. My parents are staying another five weeks or so. That seems like forever and yet, it’s less time than what has already passed. That’s not to say it’ll be easy. It’s been really rough so far and I don’t expect it to get any better. I just have to detach and pretend that I’m in a movie about a dysfunctional family rather than actually be in mine. In other words–pretend I’m not related to my parents. Look at them through the lens of, “Hm, what do we have here?” and do my best to just let the dysfunction flow by me rather than over me. \
I fucking beat death twice. I looked it in the eye and said, “Nah, I’m good.” My heart stopped twice. I’m not supposed to be here. Am I going to let family bullshit get to me? Well, yeah, but I’m going to do my best to mitigate the negative effects. At the end of the day, they’ll be returning to Taiwan. I will get my life back. I’ll get my privacy back. I’ll get my autonomy back. I drove for the first time recently (just to Cubs and back) and it weren’t no big thing. I’m taking back the cat duties, which was the big stopping point. We moved the litterboxes downstairs (all of them. Used to have one upstairs. My brother insisted that one box was enough, but I knew my Shadow. He doesn’t like to pee and poop in the same box. Plus, he likes the covered box for his poop. So I added that back to the rotation and he’s pooped in it. I know my cat better than my brother does. I used to empty his litterbox (the one upstairs) twice a day and ever since I went into the hospital, well, let’s just say that my mom isn’t as consistent about that as I was. Which makes him unhappy. Also, my brother brought over a cheap-ass litter instead of the stuff I normally use. Poor Shadow has had to adjust to the new life as much as I have.
Soon, though, we’ll both be back to something that approximates normal. I’m counting down the days.