About the Website
"Wait not for life to happen. Set forth and live your passion."
Connie Magura
LIFE’S JOURNEY THROUGH POETRY
…viewed through the eyes of an MD
I’ve always thought I would like to leave something unique for my children and grandchildren, something of no monetary value, solely a thumbprint of my existence.
What do you leave? Do you chronicle your ordinary life in an autobiography or choose a segment to create a memoir highlighting lessons learned to pass on to the next generation? Neither option felt right. I wanted to create something in perpetuity applicable to everyone. Allopathic medicine focuses on healing the body and the mind but the soul is dissected out to be managed by spiritual leaders. I felt life’s journey should be inclusive in its description. Poetry seemed the medium best suited to achieve my goal.
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As an MD, I found life’s physical journey to be married to an array of emotions harnessed by allopathic medicine through medications and counseling when deemed to be interfering with the forward progression of life. My thoughts were to chart my own memoir using poetry as a format. My objective was to stimulate the reader to engage their auditory and visual senses and apply the evoked emotions to their own unique situation.
The next step was to decide what medium to use. Emotions are fluid and often need to be addressed without delay. Although the poems were created from my own personal experience, I wanted them to be accessible to anyone who wanted to read them at anytime and anywhere. Hence the emergence of this website.
Since the website is to be fluid, my final goal will be to publish all that is written on this site over time in a book for my children and grandchildren to pass on to generations to come. This will be my thumbprint.
My Story
In 2003 at the age of 49 while running on the treadmill, I developed ventricular tachycardia thought to be due to a rare familial disorder arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia/cardiomyopathy (ARVD/C) causing sudden death in young, apparently healthy individuals.
Described by physicians at the University of Padua in Italy in 1988, ARVC was given diagnostic criteria in 1994. Then in 1999, a patient registry in the USA was established at Johns Hopkins Medicine with its first major publication in 2005 describing the clinical course of 100 US ARVC patients. The outlook was grim with 23 patients dying from sudden cardiac arrest, five developed heart failure and two had heart transplants.
Medicine almost seemed to be elated to find someone from Fargo, North Dakota with this rare diagnosis. Only the movie Fargo released in 1996 rivaled attention. Needless to say the story is long and complicated and could be the subject of a novel in itself.
The end result was that my husband drove me to the ER. I was asymptomatic except for being aware of a fast heart rate not resolving after getting off the treadmill. I remained in that rhythm for 5 hours asking my colleagues to exhaust all other causes with the tools available at the time before consenting to cardioversion. A subsequent EP (electrophysiology) study and failed ablation culminated in my receiving an implantable cardiac defibrillator. The criteria for an ICD at that time was the rhythm alone and the kinship of my profession to render an insurance policy as the data on this disease was in the infancy stage.
The calm after the storm allowed me to fully research my new found fame only to realize I didn’t quite fit the mould from many aspects, least of which I wasn’t of Mediterranean ancestry. As with many entities in medicine, time alone is often the gold standard in reaching diagnostic conclusions. Criteria for this cardiac malady was revised in 2010 adding cardiac MRI and genetic testing to the tool box.
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To continue my story…there were no further episodes of ventricular tachycardia after the ICD was implanted. The battery eventually ran out after 8 years of non-use. It humorously heralded its exit by emitting a continuous beeping sound from within my chest one day while I was examining a patient. We both looked at each other wondering whose cell phone was malfunctioning!
By this time I had scoured the medical literature and was skeptical that the label attached to my problem was not correct. The rhythm was real but all accompanying actors seemed to be in the gray zone. So, in 2011, I requested a stress echocardiogram to assess function in this thought to be progressive disease. When it was reported as being normal, I decided not to have the battery changed. Reports in the literature of devices misfiring and recalls with certain models and leads combined with 8 years of no recurrence cemented the decision in my mind. Five more years would pass before this rhythm would resurface to remind me of life’s fragility.
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In July 2017, the rhythm returned while I was trekking along the Camino in Spain. Strenuous exercise with excessive heat and dehydration provided the perfect petri dish. My husband, son, and soon to be daughter-in-law got me down off the mountain to a hotel lobby where frantic medics loaded me into an ambulance. The angst in my son’s voice as the ambulance doors were closing is an image branded in my brain. The trailing stoic voice of my husband lovingly reassuring my son “She’ll be okay, Ty. She’s your mother.” brings back fond memories of this remarkable human being who passed away April 29, 2022 The drama continued in the ambulance as I bargained for more time before cardioversion, convinced that the rhythm would convert spontaneously and convert it did!
Two more years went by before it paid me a visit. This time I was on an elliptical machine at our community gym in Florida where I had retired in 2014. Although still asymptomatic except for the fast heart rate, I felt the pain and panic in my husband’s eyes. I allowed him to take me to the ER but his angst prevented me from delaying entry from the parking lot awaiting spontaneous conversion. As we stood in line at the reception desk, I whispered to him “Stay close. When they realize I am indeed in VT as told to them, all hell will break loose.” And that it did! The end result was I was cardioverted under duress and subsequent encounters with medical personnel became increasingly strained as the conversations were always prefaced by “You need this battery changed. This rhythm can be fatal.”
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So in September 2019, I did just that after 8 years of carrying a nonfunctioning ICD in my chest. I had been to Cambodia in November 2016 and visited the temple complex at Angkor Wat where a Buddhist monk placed a red prayer string around my wrist. I was certain it had played a part in my surviving the episode on that mountain in July 2017.
My little red prayer string weathered many calamities as it wore down to a paper thin thread encompassing my wrist. It never left my sight or my wrist until one day, December 2019, 3 months after consenting to having the ICD battery changed 8 years post battery life, I looked down and to my horror, my little red prayer string was gone. Within 8 hours of this parting, the ICD went off randomly as I walked across the room. Felled like a tree, I looked up in bewilderment. Why did it go off? How did this relate to my little red prayer string? It turned out the ICD was set to fire at a very low rate of VT and for a short period of time. Based on my previous experiences of being in VT for long periods of time with no symptoms other than the fast heart rate, I asked the bar be raised to a higher level.
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The point of this story is to give context to my poem “My Little Red Prayer String”. On September 8, 2020, I finally made peace with myself knowing I had full understanding of the proverbial advice “Live everyday as if it were your last”. I completed my poem “The Last Dance” on this day, my 41st wedding anniversary. It was my first attempt at a Shakespearean sonnet, a format that I thought would be worthy of my opponent.
As the story goes, Ken was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 10 days later, September 18, 2020, the same day news arrived that Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away with the same disease after a 9-year battle. Naively, I thought my outlier cardiac status could translate to Ken being an outlier as well, just like RBG.
Sadly, it was not to be.
