My Beating Heart

Hello. It’s been a while. How’s your heart?Mine has been…very full these past few days. Isn’t the heart amazing? Here’s a little video of mine yesterday at an echocardiogram. I don’t think I have ever seen my heart before and I was fascinated. Look at it hammering away, going about its business. This tiny engine powering all of me. Seeing my dear old heart awoke so many feelings. It felt like seeing a hardworking old friend, pulling back the curtain to find the Wizard of Oz at work. They were checking to see if I have a congenital heart ‘defect’, a quadricuspic aortic valve. My lucky four leaf clover in place of the usual holy trinity shape. No one had written in the notes what I was there for so I had to remember this. Just as well I was paying attention (and obsessively following up on Chat GPT). The nice Asian lady doing the scan wasn’t sure today. She showed me. Sometimes it looks like three sometimes like four…but they’ll go away and study it. I am a shapeshifting magical unicorn.

It was quite a process. Topless which is always uncomfortable and she virtually had to sit on me as I lay sideways. She was small and plump and it felt quite cosy. Like being wrestled by a cushion. A lot of breathe in, breathe out, hold your breath, stop, breathe again, don’t breathe too deep (I had to. She was sitting on me). Occasionally she forgot to tell me I could breathe in again and I’d collapse in giggles, silently waving whilst turning blue.

I am really falling in love with all the NHS staff at Charing Cross and St Mary’s. There is hardly a bad one. So human, so open. I think I was a little defensive at first. And yes there are some young doctors you have to ask a lot of questions of and be patient with and the odd old dinosaur to stand your ground with. But on the whole they are extraordinarily patient, compassionate and kind. Especially when you open your heart.

I observed the four chambers of my heart. The blood flowing in and out. I lay there listening to the rhythmic whooshing and pounding. It reminded me of pregnancy scans and I half expected to look up at the screen and see a baby. I remarked to the nurse that I had given birth to my twins next door in the Lindo Wing. Actually triplets. 17 people in the delivery room. She asked a lot of questions about my kids and I found myself telling her about our triplet who did not survive. He would have been Alexander’s identical except he/they would have been intersex. XO. We fought to keep him even though they recommended ‘selective reduction’. A horrible phrase and practice. I lost him in utero at 16 weeks and nearly lost them all. They had to carry out an amazing procedure to save Alexander and keep them in. And I carried the triplet after he passed with the others to the end until, against all the odds, we made it to 28 weeks after my waters broke at 21 weeks with an infection. I’d wake up each day and celebrate. Every day’s a triumph! I’d say as I woke up. And it literally was. Even the day I decided to plant 100 butternut squashes in the garden with the beautiful idea of having fresh vegetables when we came out of hospital….and ended up back in hospital for my trouble. Then the slugs ate them. Life ain’t fair but we overcome eh? Our triplet had Turner’s syndrome and a cystic hygroma where the skin grows away from the body with a layer of fluid between the two. It was quite a thing. He would not have lived outside the womb but he lived in me with his brother and sister for 16 weeks. A life. A beating heart. Anazingly the nurse said her mother had lost a child, what would have been her older sister, to the same condition just before she was born. As we acknowledged this rare coincidence, this intimate passing moment of sorrow, she made a fist and said ‘you are a strong woman’ and I said ‘yes, I’ve been through a lot’. It was good to say it out loud.

My big old heart has been full of longing this week. Do you ever get that for no reason? An overwhelming uprush of emotion for nothing in particular? I feel I want to grab life and shake it, embrace it, wrestle it. Hold it tight. I don’t know exactly what this feeling is. It’s hard to describe. It’s like my heart is very full and I feel like I have a great deal still to give. It’s partly been brought on, not by sorrow, but by an uprush of excitement at the prospect of the coming weekend. Tomorrow I will pick up my dear old friend Nyla from the airport as she arrives on the red eye from New York and we will travel up to Cambridge for our Queens’ College reunion. 30 years since graduation. Actually an awkward 29 for me as I hung around for an extra year to finally do some work as I’d changed subjects from English to Social Anthropology and effectively lost a year being student union president at my college.

A small committee of four of us have been planning it since before Christmas. Three chaps got in touch to say they’d booked it six months ago after a rugby reunion when they’d gone soggy with nostalgia and then forgotten to invite anyone or tell anyone and could I help? As I was having a quiet weekend in the studio I went to work and we tracked down nearly everyone in a weekend. Anyway, on Saturday nearly 100 out of 140 odd will be there and we’ve been busy writing silly award speeches and making wooden spoon awards. It’s been a welcome distraction and I am overexcited. A few of us have hired a house to spend a bit longer together. In the midst of all the medicalisation and chaos of the past few months it has been like a beacon, a beating heart calling me and pulling me through. If any of you are reading thank you for being in touch and keeping this big old heart beating loud and strong.

Inevitably it has meant a lot of mixed feelings. Not about my time at college. That was very positive for me. More on account of nostalgia for my youth and dreams. For 19-22 year old me who had no idea what was coming. Just pure ambition. And a lot of love. There were only 40 women in my year out of a total 148 as they’d only let ladies in 12 years before and we must have been hard to find or something (?). Many of those 40 are like sisters. And I am so proud of what we’ve all achieved since. The allyship and support of these smart, funny, resilient women has meant a great deal over the years. These women have made me what I am. They made me and continue to make me stronger and braver than I feel sometimes.

As I looked at my heart today I disappeared into reverie and metaphor. This small sturdy engine like a perfectly imperfect machine pounding away, pumping blood in and out. Going about its business endlessly until one day it will simply stop. It’s work complete. We have so much capacity to give and receive. Everything flows in and flows out. Our off centre centre. My recently discovered extra leaf like a gateway. A fourth eye. My balance. If it is possible to discover I have a weird rare heart in all of this, anything is possible isn’t it? Just being here is a miracle. No wonder the heart has been such a perennial metaphor down the ages. I looked at it in wonder. Me and this little machine can get through anything I thought. Like I said to the lady. We’ve been through a lot.