Epistemological violence in America

On Saturday morning, I lay on the floor and waited for the ambulance to arrive. I had been out drinking the night before with my friend Susan (who was in town doing research and visiting), had downed probably ten beers, smoked maybe eight cigarettes. As usual, I couldn’t sleep, so as Susan passed out, I pretended to read and surfed the web. I slept shittily and only briefly. Then we woke up and went to breakfast at IHOP. I ate French toast and one egg, drank a glass of orange juice and a few glasses of unsweetened iced tea; Susan had a Southwestern omelet and stuck to water. Then we came back to my apartment, she packed her things, and we said goodbye.

I came back up to my apartment and dilly-dallied around for a bit. The hangover wasn’t aching, but I knew better than to make any major plans for the day. I envisioned doing a little reading, jotting a few notes, and probably taking a nap. My chest felt a little funny, like my heart was fluttering, so I put on my heart rate monitor, which I use for aerobic exercise, just to see what was up. My pulse was a bit arrhythmic, but it didn’t seem to be a big deal. I looked some things up on the web and was unconcerned. Suddenly, a very strange feeling came over me. I felt like my heart was racing in my chest, but I was sitting perfectly still, not exercising. I looked down at my monitor and within three seconds my pulse was at 190.

I basically fell over at that point. I didn’t really know what to do. I don’t have a car here in College Park, and I don’t know anyone in the building. I didn’t know how serious the whole thing might be. At first, I thought, this might be a panic attack, but I’ve many of them, and they never felt like this. In my experience, my heart rate during panic attacks is more like 140. So I called 911, and I tried to pull on my shoes because I figured I would need them if I was going to the hospital. And then I lay on the floor and waited for the ambulance to arrive.

The strangest thing next to the weirdness going on in my chest was laying on the floor, hearing the siren approaching, and feeling like a douche bag because it was my ambulance that was making all of the racket. My heart had slowed at this point, though it was in the 140s, way above my normal resting heart rate. It was still flopping around a bit, but even that was calming. I heard voices out in the hall. “717?” someone asked. “Yeah, 717,” another replied. They knocked, and I told them to come in. They asked me questions for a few minutes, took my pulse and blood pressure, and eventually took an EKG. By the time they got around to it, all was normal. They told me that I should go to the doctor, and that they would be happy to transport me to a hospital if I wanted. I told them I’d pass. I didn’t want to pay a few thousand dollars for a nice drive across town.

I haven’t written on this blog for two weeks. At that time, I had begun drafting a post about what I considered to be a difficult topic. In fact, the post was about how difficult I found it to talk about the topic with my closest friends. I guess it was such a difficult topic that I eventually began avoiding it, and the beginning of a draft of the post has sat on my desk for ten days. The post was to go like this: not only has so much physical distance emerged between my friends and I that I am joyful just to receive a text message from them, but I also wonder if the distance hasn’t made it hard to discuss difficult things with them. My difficult thing presently is the fact that for the last two years I have been occasionally attending church and reconsidering my relationship with religion. It’s difficult to talk about first of all because, given my decade-long rabid atheism, I now look like a flip-flopper or, worse, a hypocrite, but more importantly because I fear that my friends will fear that I will now start evangelizing to them or will become a Republican, and even if I tell them that I am about as interested in Christian apologetics, like C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, as I am in the grade school sophism of Dawkins and Dennett or that I view Christ as a pacifistic Trotskyite, still, a new, more heinous distance will grow between us. These concerns now seem silly, as do many others.

The mind is made to forget. We should give thanks for this. People with photographic memories often describe it as oppressive; they are constantly overwhelmed by the past. Forgetting allows us to move on, to live. But sometimes we wish we could hold onto moments and allow some past awful things to remain presently awful. My moment on the floor is fading from me. I haven’t forgotten about enough to not make a doctor’s appointment this morning or to not take the nurse who made my appointment seriously when she said that if this happens again I should not only call 911 but actually go to the hospital. But it seems less real, distant, almost gone. My mind has rationalized the thing. After some research, I believe that it might have been a bout of so-called “Holiday Heart,” a case of post booze-induced arrhythmia. It doesn’t seem as dangerous now. I may have to give up the bottle, but I wonder if the event will remain real enough to me that I won’t lift the next glass of beer. Mostly, I wish I could remember staring at the ceiling with the carpet against my skin as the siren approached so that these useless worries would all fall away.