February 2nd, 2026 - The Quiet House
Dear TNY,
On time for “The Quiet House” baby!
Here’s the deal. We’re going to discuss this story wikiwiki because I have other shit to talk about. As The Dude said, “I’ve got certain information, man . New shit has come to light!”
The story is meh. The premise is that two elderly women, well, really one elderly woman is reminiscing about a young man from her past because she had a dream. This woman is in her 70s now and is trying to get another woman from their tent threeways to reminisce with her, but that woman isn’t having it because she doesn’t care about the past that way. Anyway, that’s it. That’s the plot. Two different perspectives of looking back at the past and how we saw stuff then vs how we see it now.
The story took forever to get into because it was a bunch of backstory that I couldn’t connect with. Then, when the story went into the past, it’s sepia tones and wonderful Euro trips with a dude they both crushed on. That content is interesting because who doesn’t want to sleep with two young, beautiful, smart women at the same time? God knows I have and I will be reminiscing about that in my 70s, if I make it there. So I get all that. But why the fuck does it matter, man? I know that short fiction isn’t supposed to tell us why it matters, but they are supposed to show us why it matters and I can’t see it anywhere here. It’s just not there for me. Sadly, like most of your stories, this shit falls flat because it’s missing the most important piece: transcendence.
That’s it. Review over.
Something happened on Saturday. But really we should be talking about Friday. So I’ll start there. Well, maybe Thursday.
Thursday night was like any other. I had gone to therapy that day and discussed some things, particularly regarding nausea, gagging, the acne, general unease, and their relation to alcohol. The therapist had stated that he had seen these things before (real quick, he also has a theory about why I gained a stutter when distressed a few years back as well as why I have twitches when under great amounts of stress; he believes I have Functional Neurological Disorder, in which when my brain is trying to rid itself of “pain” it develops involuntary issues in the functional motor and operational systems as a result), but that they were generally not the symptoms of too much alcohol consumption, but were, in fact, related to stress and anxiety. Now, when alcohol recedes, sure, anxiety is made worse. I get that. But what he was trying to say is that I don’t have a chemical dependency on alcohol and I don’t have physical manifestations of it. What I have is a coping mechanism, part of which is to use alcohol, and that has contributed to my anxiety, but that also my anxiety is why I have a coping mechanism. So it’s a win/win until it’s a lose/lose. I get that too.
Had a fine Thursday night. Made dinner. Went to bed. Then I had this dream. The contents of the dream were sad. Heartbreaking. Yearning and desperation. And when I woke up at 0616 Friday morning my heart was beating out of rhythm. Now, I have been diagnosed with PVCs in the past, so that was my assumption. As I lay in bed, I checked my pulse in a few places and had my friend listen atop my chest. All confirmed shit was out of whack. I haven’t had PVCs in over a decade though, so I thought it was strange. But I just chalked it up to that.
The day goes well, I do pretty much nothing. I made some killer cheeseburgers for dinner and watched a movie and some shows and went to bed. The next morning, my heart was still arhythmic. In the past, the PVCs would swoop into and out of the day, flutter here and there, and then leave. This, on the other hand, was constant. Still, I was thinking PVCs. We chose to stay in that day other than to go grab some steak and wood to build a chicken coop. We had plans to hang with some friends around 1700 so I was trying to nap on the couch at one point in the afternoon. As I was napping, though, the position that my hand was in was over my heart, and I just kept feeling the fluttering get more staccato and the main beat get more erratic and strong. Like, really strong. Hard, but also skipping beats sometimes and then hammering a couple three in a row. So I Googled when to go to the doctor for arrhythmia. And Google was playing it pretty conservative and told me if the beatboxing lasted more than 30 seconds in length and happened frequently in the day I should go to the ER.
Well shit.
So I get a little scared but still think it’s PVCs, which I had gone to the doctor for before and it was a waste of time. I jump in an Uber anyway, and tell my friend I will catch up with her later after it all resolves. I go to the ER, waltz in, tell the man what’s happening and he pushes me to the front of the line. The next woman does my vitals and asks me to sit in a chair that’s labeled “Reserved”. Then a man comes through another door and calls me over. I go to a station where he asks me to take my shirt off and he grabs a medical razor and shaves a bunch of patches out of my chest hair. He hooks up all the stickers and runs an EKG. I look at him and can’t see the monitor because it’s facing away from me and say, “These are PVCs, right?” And he immediately says, “No, you are in AFib. See?” He turns the monitor toward me and it looks like something spit out by a seismograph during an earthquake. The printer is shooting out a paper copy which he rips off and says, “You can put your shirt on but you’re just going to have to take it off,” and then leaves. I shake the piles of chest hair off of me and stand up to brush off as much as I can and put my shirt on because why not and he comes back and says, “Come with me.” He takes me to room 8 and a guy throws him a sheet which he puts on the bed. I kick my slippers off and sit on the bed and suddenly people are everywhere. Someone asks me to take my shirt off and lay down. I do. And two people come up, one on either side, and put IVs in me. The crash cart is rolled in and everyone is talking really fast about how much I weigh and what my vitals are as another person puts on the BP cuff. And I’m looking up at the ceiling answering questions about symptoms and I’m quietly crying, tears rolling down my face, and I’m thinking about Elizabethtown, a movie I was listening to while trying to nap before I came to the hospital. There’s a scene where Orlando Bloom sees his dad’s dead body and the mortician puts a box of tissues on the side of the casket and I thought to myself, who needs tissues to cry because I always just let the tears run which was funny to me right then as a platoon of medical professionals were saying a lot of things and attaching a bunch of sticky pads to me after having found a real, powered razor and cleared me of chest hair that never had been removed before. And there those tears were again when the doctor explained to me that I was in AFib, pretty badly, and he needed to figure out exactly when it started because he wanted to use a procedure to knock the heart back to a regular beat but we couldn’t do that if it had been more than 48 hours. At 48 hours clotting can begin so he didn’t want to blast clots into my brain and give me a stroke. Remember, yesterday around this time I was having a beer across the street from The Local General where I would pick up beef and lettuce and other goods for cheeseburgers and life was ideal? Not so much now. So we dial it down to 36 hours and this kicks off a speech from him in which he explains that he wants to do something called cardioversion. This involves a machine that is hooked up to your heart and listens to the electrical signals, synchronizes with your heart rate, and then blasts your heart with electricity in the hopes that it will jump start it on the correct rhythm. The risks are that it can stop your heart, but they prehook you up to a defibrillator in case that happens so they can pop you back. Another risk is that if you do have clotting it can blow those clots into your brain and you throw a stroke. He is explaining all of this while they were hooking it up and I said yes to everything while crying and signed the papers and I have since gone to the YouTubes and saw AFib that was way less than mine and results…well, we’ll get to that. He says they are going to give me a sleep drug but it is very fast because they need to wake me up after the shock so that they can talk to me to see if I’m having a stroke or not. And he said it would be unpleasant if we did no sedative. I agree to all of this too.
From the time I entered the ER to the time I was on that bed and the doctor was calling for a timeout to ensure that all the cables were hooked in and all the sensors were where they should be and that everyone knew their job was 10 minutes. Once the timeout was complete, they gave me the 10ml of the drug and I started to feel sleepy and I heard him ask for 150 joules on the machine. And then I heard “clear” and the darnedest thing happened. It felt like Dr. Strange knocked my astral form out of my body, but with a nuclear weapon. I don’t know that I can describe to you what it was like other than it was wild. The doctor shook my shoulder and asked me how I was and I told him that was fucking crazy and that I had never felt anything like that before. I guess my speech was fine because he turned his attention to the staff and said we needed to do another. We did the same shot of sleepytime and he asked the machine be turned up to 200 joules. I found out later from an internal medicine doc that this is the most you can give a person. They blasted me again and both times they blasted me the noise that came out was primal, but the second time it was unreal. My limbs all flew into the air and then when they came back down they all went into mini seizures. He shook me awake again and we started chatting. He told me that my heart did correct, but not fully. That I was right on the edge of AFib and normal heart rate. He used the word bigeminy. Before they shocked me my BP was 197/175. Afterward it was in the mid 160s, which was better. And my heartrate had dropped as well. They administered drugs to try to control my heartrate after that, which did have a positive effect. I sat there for a few hours watching the heartrate monitor. As my BP dropped and my heartrate continued to drop, PVCs exploded on the monitor and I kept getting thrown back into small bouts of AFib as well. So it wasn’t all the way fixed, still right on the brink of falling back in.
And like a sneaky little bitch, I tried to figure out what was causing the AFib. And it turns out I could control it. I experimented four different times with varying times between trying. The end result is that if I thought about a certain thing hard enough (I tried other things, they didn’t work), I could throw the machine into AFib. Wild.
After enough time had passed, they admitted me to the hospital to watch my heart overnight. I was given a smaller EKG machine that wirelessly reported my condition to the nurse’s desk as well as to the cardiologist. All that waiting was boring so I will spare you other than I was rooming with a man with perpetual sleep apnea who was hallucinating, talking to said hallucinations, and farting uproariously. Oh, and kinking his arm so that his IV pump kept alarming. Like 50 times. Ugh.
In the morning, the doctors tried to ascertain why this happened. Two doctors came up with two different reasons. See, I have no genetic markers for this. And none of the other health factors. So based on a bunch of questions, the first doctor, he concluded that it must be alcohol because it could not be anything else (he said he didn’t think that stress had that much of an effect on this type of arrhythmia). The second doctor stated that alcohol may be a factor, but that stress was number one, especially after she heard what stress I had been going through for years.
What can we take away from this? Firstly, I need to reduce stress and alcohol. By coming to Hawaii, I was already in the process of reducing stress, it just didn’t work because the stress followed me in the form of the dream and many other things. But I was trying. And the alcohol thing was to begin on the 30th, after I was back on the mainland. So these things are in play. The other thing I really appreciated about both the internal med docs, after hearing about my substance abuse therapist and the work we have been doing, is that they both agreed that I don’t have a chemical dependency, I have a coping mechanism that uses a chemical to treat deeper emotional trauma. It’s so nice to hear more and more medical professionals speak this way. Because once they both understood that, both said that rehab was not for me, and neither were the shots to reduce or remove cravings for alcohol, which I don’t have. They understood that the work with the therapist is the right work for my issue, and were glad I was already working on it.
We can also take away some hard facts. Before the procedure started a doctor asked me what I wanted done if I died during the procedure. Did I want them to try everything possible to bring me back to life. And I started crying and said, “No, I don’t. But I know that everyone in my life wants you to do that so I’m going to say yes for them.” Later, when being admitted to the hospital, I did a long entrance document that had a section about self-harm and self-worth and the guy was astonished at my answers because of how bad my mental health was.
Guys, I am not okay. The world has literally broken my heart. It reached in and rewired how part of my heart functions and broke it into pieces such that it cannot keep time anymore. I say the world, but it isn’t the world. It’s some of the world. It’s things I did to hurt people. It’s people that hurt me, some more than others. It’s divorce and loss and grief and beauty and love and love and love and love. My heart takes all this in and tries to carry it. Understand it. Find the dark parts and then pull the beauty from them. I didn’t nearly die of a broken heart, because I didn’t nearly die, but I could have died over a broken heart in the form of a stroke or cardiac arrest or any other manner of things.
My heart is broken. And I have figured out a way to treat that, but that doesn’t work as well as it used to. And by writing, the writing may actually be making it worse? I don’t know.
So there’re paths forward from here, which I have already started executing on. I have to sit down somewhere and seek medical attention (particularly cardiology, likely in the form of an ablation). I have to try to move on. Let go. Change. I can do all of these things. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve blown my life up and put it back together again. I’m just not done with this chapter yet because I know what happens when chapters are over. But I need to be. So there it is.
The reality is that it happened. This happened. When I got blown outside of my body, I saw what the world did to me as plain as day. What I did to myself, because I’m not just a victim here. I’m also the perpetrator. The world broke my heart. Like it does to us all. Maybe I got more than my share. Maybe I didn’t. It’s an individual experience and I can’t speak for others, only myself, but the more broken I become the more empathy I have for all others who are broken and even more for those who believe they aren’t. I tried to fix my brokenness with alcohol and love. Love is the right answer, every time. But love involves other people and those other people didn’t work out. Sometimes because of me. Sometimes because of them. And sometimes because of nothing at all. Meanwhile alcohol never says no. And it works. For a time.
When I broke the news to people, I mostly got how can I help? I have a lot of good people in my life that want me to stay here. That say they need me, even though I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t even think my kids were worried. It’s like The Wizard of Kindness said, “People don’t believe this is happening to you because you’re the strongest person we know.” But, back to Lebowski, “Strong men also cry.”
I’ve been thinking about it since I left the hospital. The heart, it can only take so much. To be this vulnerable all the time is painful. To work in the realm of empathology. I fail, sure. I’ve done mean things. Said mean things. And those things hurt me too. Generally longer than the hurt that is brought to my doorstep. So what am I supposed to do if my heart can’t take all this beauty anymore? All of our failings? And joy? And love? And sadness? And grief? The answer to that is…I don’t know. But I can’t give up now. I know that in the past I was a simpler person, but I had a hard time understanding others’ feelings and how they would react to things I was doing. Now, I have a better understanding. I still fuck this up wildly. I get angry when I’m hurt just like anyone else. I make mistakes with people’s emotions. I do dumb shit, to be frank. But I try to admit these things now. Be softer. Roll over and show my belly. Say I’m sorry first, no matter whose fault it is. Because ultimately I’m just sorry for this moment. And that’s what I told the ER doc when he asked me how I was doing after both shocks, him saying that it was a lot to take. I said, “I’m fine. That moment was hard. I am no longer in that moment so I am better.”
And that’s this life. Good moments and bad moments and all the shit in between. And sorries. And love. And beauty. And heart disease. And fighting. Fighting is hard. But it’s fucking necessary. Sorries are doorways out of those moments, into other, better ones. Ones where progress is made. Where healing happens.
If my heart can’t stand this place and lets go, so be it. But vulnerability is the win. No matter what happens. Every day working on how to be softer. Kinder. More giving. And apologizing when I fuck it up.
See you down the road, chappies.
Nick
