Little Sir Echo

So this is me having an echo-cardiogram. The lady tech and I cut our hair and grew beards for it,  just for laughs. OK not really but she sure was funny as she sat beside me the whole time. “I don’t go on Facebook,” she said out of nowhere.  “I don’t go online at all when I’m home. I sound like Ted Kaczynski, I know, right, but seriously I have ENOUGH COMPUTER TIME here at work!”She was certainly having enough then as I lay beside her, bare from the waist up, the hospital johnnie pushed pretty much completely aside and 6 or 8 electrodes planted like so many leeches on the skin of my torso.“Sooooo, any holes?” she cheerily said, peering at what looked like a pregnant woman’s ultrasound. It was all I could do not to ask if she could see a little stem on the apple as they say, but then I realized I was looking at a site that sure does get your attention: a rhythmically repeating shimmy and jerk, a shimmy and jerk, and at the core of it this weird little valve flinging itself open and shut again with a wet sucking sound.It was, in short, my heart.But from then on it was all fun. We had me standing with all these electrodes comically affixed to my chest and a swaying pack of God -knows-what kind of circuitry affixed to my hip. I felt like a cow hooked up to a milking machine. We had me breathing hard in and out and  fast as I could, which brought me clear back to my blue ribbon fainting days as a little girl.  We had me trotting along on an up-tilted continuously-accelerating treadmill to the point of failure as they say in the gym, then hopping quick back onto the gurney to measure how long it would take for my heart to stop screaming in panic.A young exercise physiologist was also present who told me she had been a gymnast and a dancer as a girl. “Hey I didn't know you were a gymnast!” said my pal the echo-tech who owned as how she had once been a figure skater. So then we talked butt muscles and thigh strength and how the younger girl always loved old Tonya Harding bless her crooked little heart, and in general I have to say the time just flew by. I was outa there in under an 70 minutes, smiling my face off -  that is until I remembered the world-famous heart doc. "I hate how he's always after me to lose ten pounds and exercise 60 minutes a day and all that," I whined to my new best friend the echo-tech.“Pffft!” she said  “First of all you're NOT overweight and anyway what does he know, a skinny guy like that? Take it from me you NEVER wanna listen to some skinny guy!”And with that  we shook hands and I danced out the door, free as a bird until the next echo- test in late 2012. Oh yeah, that is after next Tuesday, when Skinnyman and I sit down to talk about what it showed.  :-(

resting comfortably afterward