My therapist has a fairy frightening medical condition. in The Big, Blue, House. Year two.

My therapist has a scary, potentially fatal heart condition. I don’t know her age, but she’s referenced her father when I talk about the past, as in “My dad told me about…”, so I gather I’m old enough to be her mother, and I’m fifty. So I’m guessing she’s thirty-two or younger.

First it was a missed appointment with a mysterious medical emergency. Then the explanation that she feinted, and her heart wasn’t getting enough oxygen to her brain. That was the first week of January. Since then she’s missed two more appointments because she had to be rushed to the hospital, and she’s seen at least two specialists, and is now wearing a heart monitor for the next two weeks, to see the pattern of her heart and theoretically make a diagnosis.

Of course I ask her every time I see her how she’s doing. In the last week, she’s been to the emergency room, and learned that getting intravenous fluids stabilizes her. So now she’s drinking pedialite. She says that they don’t know why the fluids help her.

I asked her if she has to keep working to keep her health insurance, she says no. She says she does it because she loves her job, and likes helping people.

What I did not say, (go me, not saying something that I was thinking is like holding back a landslide), is that most of what she’s doing, with me anyway, is giving me someone to worry about and the anxiety of not knowing from one week to the next whether she’ll even be alive.

If I stopped seeing her, then I’d worry even more, so this is preferable to that. But still. In her particular circumstances, I think it would’ve been better for both her, and her clients, to have taken a sort of sabbatical after the initial “medical emergency”, until her health is sorted out. It’s terrifying me, and putting undo stress on her.

Or maybe working really DOES help her emotionally, and I’m just being selfish.

But it’s harder talking to someone when you know that too much stress could literally kill her. I can’t get too dark, she’ll start staring at her desk with her hand on her head. So I spend approximately half of the hour, (well, forty minutes today, because she was ten minutes late, and she wanted to quit at ten til’), asking her about herself. How is she doing, did the train explosion affect her or her family, when is her next doctor’s appointment, ect. I spend a lot of the remaining time talking about things I’d tell anyone, like the nigh endless weird qualities of this house, and I might spend five minutes telling her anything about my actual emotional issues.

If I have a breakdown over anything, I won’t want to tell her about it, for fear it might trigger her heart to skip enough beats to send her to the emergency room again. I intentionally try to keep the conversation as light as possible.

I’m not mad at her. I’m very, very concerned. I just think she should be resting. I don’t think she’s really in any condition to do her job.

I asked her if there was any chance she might get a pacemaker or something like that. She says she hopes it’s something neurological, because it would be easier to fix than surgery. I can understand that. Cardiac surgery is scary.

Like I told her: I have a nasty habit of outliving people. Please don’t die.