"My Heart Stood Still" by Rev. Thomas Schade

[Memos from Rev. Barbara Merritt and Rev. Tom Schade]

M I N I S T E R’ S  M E M O




“My Heart Stood Still”


Sometime over the summer, I developed a case of atrial fibrillation, or
“A-Fib.” It’s an electrical problem in the heart which results in an
irregular heartbeat. In some more extreme cases, it results in that pounding
heart, even at rest, that plagues some people at times.

Atrial Fibrillation is not rare, and not even uncommon, and so I am sure
that a lot of you are nodding along, having been down this path. One of the
problems is that it can be persistent, especially as you get older, so a lot
of people have it chronically.

But since I was new to this, my doctors recommended the usual treatment for
A-Fib, which is cardioversion. Cardioversion is, to the language of
computers, to reboot your heart, or to use even more basic language, to turn
the device off and then back on, hoping that it works better after a fresh
start.

There are some complicating factors and associated risks and protocols to
minimize those risks, (aren’t there always?) The result is that you are
scheduled for your cardioversion about a month away, which gives time for
protocols and risk and complication and for you to ponder the idea of
letting people deliberately stop your heart. By the way, since your heart
has no accessible on/off switch, they do it with an electric shock. That’s
all they do; they stop your heart with an electric shock. Then they wait,
and then, the heart starts up all by itself.

Right away I had sympathy for my heart. Here is this little thing, beating
along reliably, day and night, year after year, for all this time. So, now
it shuffles along like an old soldier with bad feet and sore ankles, instead
of marching with the crisp rhythm of the young? Do we have to hit it with a
cattle prod? After all, I plan on using that heart for another couple of
decades!

Beyond that, in those weeks of waiting for my cardioversion, I wondered, in
that child-like zone where hearts are the centers of emotion, whether
stopping my heart would bring about a reset of my emotional state.

Would this be a chance to junk all the negative and unuseful attachments and
antipathies that I had built up over the years, the idealization of that
person, that unreasonable suspicion of another? How about that arbitrary
dislike and that unthinking bias? Wouldn’t it be great if all of that could
be left behind?

Of course, none of that happened. The cardioversion went well. I snapped
into the proper rhythm on the second try, which is not unusual. And of
course, the nurses and anesthiologoists and doctors who cared for me were
wonderful. I remember nothing of it and life seems the same, except for this
round mark on my chest that hurt like a mild sunburn for a day.

Emotionally, I am still as impulsive and unreasonable as before, apt to like
or dislike people without reason or cause. Fortunately, I tend toward being
too generous with strangers and friends, almost as sympathetic as a mortgage
broker selling subprime loans.

These are problems I have to work on, on my own. Fortunately, I have this
church community to work with me on this.

On another note: it now turns out that the beginning of the church year will
always coincide with the remembrance of the Al Qaeda attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. May God once again touch the hearts of all
those who grieve with the hands of healing and comfort. On those days, our
hearts stood still, and when they started again beating again, we were
emotionally transformed by a sense of social solidarity with each other as
citizens. It was day that felt like everything had changed. Of course, it
hadn’t. More accurately, it was a day when we forgot much of what we knew,
knowledge we had gained the hard way through the experience of Vietnam and
Cambodia.








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