There is so much sound in my apartment. It seeps. It cloaks the corners of the cabinets and disguises itself so I can’t tell where what I hear is coming from. Even with a $40 white noise machine and earplugs made especially for smallish ear canals I feel, often, like I’ve become a tuning fork. I ring. Yes, the floors creak and the doors are heavy enough to slam if you let go of the handle too quickly and the shower will drip unless you turn a certain dial back and forth for a while and (I know!) “It’s New York!” but also my radiator hisses and squeals and the brick wall crumbles into sand even though I do not touch it. The fridge gurgles and whines and she thinks she has an ice-maker but she doesn’t. Sometimes someone in the alley sings. I usually recognize the song but don’t appreciate the rendition. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any one of these individual announcements but altogether there is just so much sound in my apartment.
When I moved in the sound was all I could talk about. Can you hear that over the phone? I’m sorry about the humming in the bathroom. Yeah… I don’t know what that was but I think it’s fine. You don’t smell anything burning, right? I had all of the sounds investigated by a rotating cast of men who sometimes wore a uniform and sometimes brought a friend “who knows more about this anyway” and feel comfortable now giving a small nod of acknowledgement when a new sound joins the chorus because I know it’s not just New York it’s this place, and this place has a voice and really I’m the new noise. Accustomed to the sound, I’m more concerned now with why the HelloFresh directions have me putting things slathered in olive oil into the oven when the temperature is set at 450 degrees. Also, I’ve been having chest pain.
If I were to place three fingers over my heart after declaring scout’s honour, that’s where I would locate the tightness. When the sensation becomes heavy I put my hand up my shirt and feel my heart beating against my ribcage. It thrums in a way that makes it hard to recite Shakespeare in rhythm. I took the complaint to a doctor who asked me twice to read my BPM on my watch. I could not do so because the only cool thing my Timex does is glow when I press the crown. She asked me to keep an eye on my heart rate another way and referred me to a cardiologist.
I couldn’t get an appointment until the end of November so I puzzled over the pain myself. It was new but I had not done anything to cause it. I am young and eat vegetables and live in a walk-up so even checking the mail requires hundreds of steps. Since moving back to New York and starting a new part time job in a writing center and acquainting myself to the sound of my apartment and teaching in person for the first time the only new thing I’ve really been doing is running. Inspired by a friend who is running her fourth marathon this Sunday, I started an 8-week plan in September that had me scheduled to run my first 10-kilometer race on Halloween.
Training came easily and I loved it. I bought the ugliest sunglasses I could find so no one would talk to me and I ran faithfully three times a week. I ran when I was angry and elated, in the rain and on sunny afternoons and I felt good. I was even getting faster. On October 17 I ran 8 kilometers, the longest I’d ever run! I had just two weeks left and the runs were all going to be short until the “race day” which I’m putting in quotations because the race was just going to be me, alone, trying to make it a full loop around Central Park with maybe one friend waiting for me at the end of the loop with my water bottle and a donut.
To make it to “race day” I had to learn a new way to make my body work. I’d never been a runner before but figured out (ie. my friend who runs told me) that by “saving all my energy” for my runs, I was setting myself up for injury. I adapted by supplementing my running with foam rolling and some low-impact strength work-outs. The pain in my left hip that had started to make it uncomfortable to sit faded with the cross training. Just like the sound in my apartment, I learned to adjust. Something unfamiliar could become recognizable, could be overcome.
Not so much with the chest pain. I missed a few runs and had one night of a lot of tequila that I didn’t have to pay for and then student workers at school went on strike. The university emailed everybody to let them know that if students did not attest to work they wouldn’t get their wages or their stipends. You can’t get fired for striking but you also can’t pay rent if you don’t get paid. I joined the picket line on Wednesday and ate a donut I didn’t earn for running around the park.
Trying for a 10k during a fight for a fair contract seemed like a good idea. The training provided me with structure, and small achievable time-based goals. This was the kind of future-planning I’d been taught in workshops about becoming a powerful woman. But I didn’t make the 10k and on Wednesday, sometime after the donut (but not directly, okay? I don’t think the donut did it) I took myself to the ER because I thought I was dying.
I introduced myself and the chest pain. I was (I thought) pretty calm. The triage nurse put a heart rate finger trap on and asked for my height and weight and zip code and then for confirmation: “history of anxiety?” I don’t know what chart she was reading but I said yeah, I’m an alive person, the world is frightening, it’s okay though. I’m okay. Then she asked “are you nervous right now?” and isn’t that the stupidest question you ever heard? Can you imagine anyone in the world answering “no?” to that question in an emergency room? Is it possible to have pain in your chest that has lead you to believe you may not make it through the night and not be nervous?
The EKG was clear (that’s good!) but my chest still hurt. I didn’t want to take the Valium the doctor offered because I wasn’t having a panic attack. I know what a panic attack feels like. My panic puts me on the floor. The chest pain wasn’t doing that. The chest pain was making me afraid to go to sleep. The more adamant I became that I was not nervous, the more I needed a nap (I’m not tired I’m not tired I’m not tired).
Before Wednesday, I mean way before, like years, I’d been at another hospital because I thought I was going to die. My chest didn’t hurt but nothing made sense and I couldn’t talk much and when I was asked where it hurt all I could say was “all over.” I didn’t want to die but I knew I was going to. I was going to be sure of it. I think I definitely should have been offered a Valium at that visit way before Wednesday. Instead I got a pamphlet for a counselling service on my college campus.
I took the Valium this Wednesday (just 2.5mg) because there was nothing else to do. I didn’t feel better but I certainly felt different. I walked home on legs that felt like they belonged to a baby deer. The small cacophonous symphony of my apartment welcomed me. I looked at the discharge papers and read that my condition “does not appear serious” and that my pain “is not coming from the heart.”
Something else, then.