Chest Pain

I have an appointment with my cardiologist tomorrow.  Been having quite a bit of trouble lately with chest pain and mitral valve prolapse.  I was looking online today at possible outcomes of mitral valve prolapse, such as valve repair surgery and valve replacement surgery.  I laughed to myself and thought maybe I’ll just ask if he can take the whole damn thing out.  We’ve joked about my heart like this before.  I remember walking in his office once and him asking how my heart had been, and I burst into tears, saying I wasn’t sure there was much of it left. 

I am a true Pisces in that I don’t know how to love or feel things halfway.  When I love someone, I love them with all of my heart.  I give them everything I possibly can.  I try, with every fiber of my being, to make them feel loved.  Perhaps the most painful thing for me, about being alone, is having nowhere for my love to go.  Sometimes it literally feels like a kinked hose inside of me….the force of the water being held back but pulsating persistently, demanding to be freed, to spring forth.  Sure, there are plenty of other places for my love to go when there isn’t one special person in my life to love romantically.  But we all know it’s not the same…

Sometimes my honest thought is that I wish I didn’t have a heart – figuratively speaking of course – for obvious reasons.  I’m tired of having it broken, and of feeling it hurt, just as I get tired of chest pain interrupting my life, my job, my time with my children, etc.  At the same time, I recognize that my heart would be so much emptier if it had never been filled with love.  I consider myself lucky to have been in love (and to have been loved) several times in my life.  I know what it feels like to soar with giddiness, bursting at the seams, all because you have found a person whom you love and who loves you back.  If I didn’t have a heart, I wouldn’t be able to recall a time when I’d felt love, and therefore I wouldn’t be able to hope to feel it again. 

My chest pains never began, and my heart condition was not diagnosed, until after the birth of one of my children.  Did this health condition develop as an effect of pregnancy or childbirth?  I have no idea, and I don’t care to know, because I wouldn’t trade that child to rid myself of the pain and discomfort I so often feel in my chest.  Likewise, I wouldn’t trade the feeling of a broken heart to erase the love whose disappearance caused this pain.   

And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end, the way it all would go
Our lives are better left to chance

I could have missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the dance

"The Dance", performed by Garth Brooks