Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [11]
At Massachusetts General Hospital, I was put on a gurney and hooked to an IV tube and heart monitor. A nurse took some blood. The test came back rapidly, and a doctor told me there was no trace of the protein that would indicate that I had suffered a heart attack. It was a case, he said, of atrial fibrillation, a flutter of my heart’s left atrium. “Have you had this before?” he asked. I told him it was my third experience in eight years. “Getting to be a habit, I see,” he said, which I took to be medical humor.
I was in no danger of dying once the doctors had administered a blood thinner, which prevented a clot from forming in the blood that might pool in my misfiring heart. The hazard presented by a clot is in its possible trip to the brain, where it can lodge and cut off the supply of oxygen. This, of course, is a stroke. The doctors—and there seemed to be a growing number of them, including interns, that gathered around my bed each day—were reassuring, but they warned me against a recurrence. In the two previous incidents, and in this one, too, the A-fib had been preceded by a period of anxiety. Each occurrence had increased the likelihood of another. In times of major stress, my heart was learning to slip down a well-beaten path toward arrhythmia.
For the better part of a week, the doctors and I waited for my heart to stop tapping out its distress signal. I sat in the hospital bed and looked out a big window that framed a blue stretch of the Charles River beyond Beacon Hill. Water has always made my mind wander. As sailboats skimmed the surface of the Charles and salt water dripped through a tube into my right arm, I spooled back to those cool late September days when I was a boy of thirteen in South Jersey. Barnegat Bay would flatten under a thin blue sky, and I would row out with long wooden oars to catch a few of the snapper blues that were left over from the August run. It was a good memory, the sun on my shoulders and the red-and-white bobber racing over the wavelets whipped up by summer’s last breath.
In the present, though, the heart monitor continued to beep an irregular rhythm. My heart refused to end its tantrum. It wanted to be heard. It had a message. A hospital gives you a lot of time to listen. The idea of getting back to my first self began to seem more important.
In a world that hadn’t seemed entirely reliable or kind these past few years, the memories of the woods and waters of my boyhood were pleasurable, and the notion of the cabin, which I had been entertaining, seemed a natural next-step extension of them. My mind grew calm as I pondered how I might build this cabin. I considered its dimensions, thought about materials and even began, in my daydreaming, to hang fishing rods on its walls. I’d make a big mess of blueberry pancakes for the people I brought there. Many of the feelings I had been sorting through seemed to be converging and shifting for the better.
Then, along with everything else, there was this thought that just appeared from I don’t know where: the cabin would be a home of last resort. It would root me in a place. It would be my hedge against that old and irrational fear, homelessness. Maybe that had been the ultimate source of my anxiety, and the message my heart was tapping out through the bars of my ribs: build yourself a home.
To the surprise of the doctors, my heart went back to its even beating without the electric shock to my chest that they already had scheduled.
Back at the apartment, after leaving the hospital, I felt stirrings of anticipation and possibility. It helped that it was September, a month I’ve always associated with beginnings. The