Paper Heart

All morning at the library’s drop-in toddler playtime, I was bleary-eyed and slightly loopy, my arm throbbing from a recent vaccine shot, a tender red knot at the site, and hardly any sleep the night before—the vaccine doing its work, but also, on alert for my husband, who’d just come home from the hospital, one of those same day surgeries. 

Modern medicine is a miracle. A dose of vaccine to keep a potentially scary virus at bay. A threading up through a vein and into the heart muscle (or something along those lines. I don’t quite understand the surgery they did on my husband.) What happened was this: 

He had a procedure last year to take care of a heart issue. The heart issue was fixed. But then he got sick with Covid, and the problem came back, and the doctor recommended the procedure again. He was scheduled for October, but suddenly, a sooner appointment slot opened up, and we jumped on it. 

While my husband scrambled around doing the pre-surgery prep work, unrelated-but-sorta-related, I scrambled around trying to find a place that would give me a Covid vaccine, the guidelines not at all clear anymore in Ohio. Could I walk into a pharmacy or did I need a prescription? Did I qualify to get a shot or would I have to make an impassioned case for myself? (Listen, this virus fff-ed up my husband’s heart!) 

I marched into a nearby CVS, ready for battle, prepared to beg if I had to, but it was all very anti-climactic, with Fred the Pharmacy Manager kindly jabbing me, no questions asked.

The surgery went off without a hitch too. A half a day at the hospital and we were home, my husband groggy, but already feeling better, his heart back in normal rhythm, and I went off to work, jittery from little sleep, a whoosh of worry catching up with me, my panging arm, but happy to be distracted by a beach ball being flung at my head by a three-year-old. 

She was surprised when I caught it. Honestly, I was surprised too. I tossed it back at her and she caught it easily, surprising both of us again. We threw the ball at each other approximately five thousand times and would probably still be doing it now, but I had to take a timeout to turn on the bubble machine, and then there were towers to build out of squishy blocks and touch-and-feel books to touch and feel. I forgot 

about my throbby arm. I forgot about the hours waiting in the waiting room at the hospital, trying to read my book, but mostly distracted by the time ticking by, one hour into the surgery, two, nearing three—and shouldn’t my husband be out by now??—the nurses calling out names to give updates to other loved ones waiting, fidgeting for my turn and when would it be my turn? 

But then it was my turn. A few minutes alone in a smaller private room, the cardiologist impossibly young and confident. 

Everything went well, he said, and something something about heart valves and arteries, electrical charges, closing a loop. I didn’t know what loop he was talking about. He had taken a red pen out of his pocket and he was drawing a heart on a piece of paper. 

I watched, mesmerized, as he squiggled and scrawled, for a moment everything making perfect sense before it slipped away from me, but no matter. The point was the heart was healed, 

and time skipped forward. The waking up out of surgery, the ride home, a careful walk upstairs to bed, an anxious sleep, until morning at the library, beach balls bouncing around the room, my own heart catching, slowing, beating regularly again.