Gannon Knight Perspective

     I have a broken heart. No, seriously – I do, literally, have a malfunctioning heart. It has nothing to do with my personal life, of course. I developed a cardiovascular defect when I was 14 years old.
     Take a deep breath before you try to pronounce its obscenely long name: supraventricular tachycardia. But you can call ‘er SVT for short. Essentially, it means I have an electrical short circuit in my heart – and once something trips the wire, my heart rate abruptly skyrockets until I jolt it back.
     I became aware of it one afternoon during volleyball practice in ninth grade, when our team was running a low-key drill. All of a sudden, my heart started beating extremely fast for no reason – and after checking in with my

coach and sitting down, I took my pulse.
     The result? A whopping 250 beats per minute. As I was sitting still. The doctors were intrigued.
     With all the electrodes and dangling wires on the myriad heart monitors I had to wear, I looked curiously similar to E.T. It baffles me, actually, to think the judgmental high school crowd didn’t eternally cast me off into the social abyss. Apparently I’m more likeable than I thought.
     I reached a first-name familiarity with all sorts of cardiologists and chatty nurses, who instructed me that I had to capture these irregular heartbeats on the monitors or an electrocardiogram in order to receive an official diagnosis.
     But – talk about the mind/body connection – my heart insisted on following its own rules.
     Of course I didn’t have the rapid pulse episodes when I was wearing the heart monitors. Nope. That would have made the process far too easy. I remember one evening when I bopped around my kitchen like an idiot, monitor wires a-flapping, as I tried to shock my heart into some kind of spasm so I could get its crazy beats on the record and validate that I wasn’t making this all up.
     No such luck. My heart, apparently, prefers to elude constrictive labeling. It appreciates a little mystery.
     A month later, I somberly returned my old friend the heart monitor – we had, after all, become quite close – as the doctors shrugged their shoulders and told me they couldn’t make an official diagnosis.
     My compartmentalized mind, of course, became irked by this lack of certainty, but my irritation was eased when they told me it was “most likely” SVT. The doctors instructed me on some breathing exercises to help calm myself down and sent me on my way.
     My ol’ ticker still races on occasion, approximately once every few months or so. Though SVT, for me, isn’t a life-threatening condition by any means, it can be downright irksome. Plus, that breathing technique the doctors taught me to slow it down makes me feel like a baby bird trying to swallow a bowling ball.
     I guess I’ll just have to live with what I’ve got – a heart that, on occasion, gets a little too ahead of itself.
     But at least I know it’s beating.