Beat by Destiny’s Plans
I am depressed!
About 9 or 10 months ago, I quit smoking. Being a smoker for almost my entire adult life was a challenging move. I was sleepy for three months, cranky all the time, and gained significant weight.
With me giving up smoking, alcohol never really felt the same. So I reduced my alcohol intake to negligible. My younger self would laugh at my booze capacity these days.
I even started cycling five days a week to reduce weight and improve my overall health. I started a diet plan, too, and that was going pretty nicely.
And then I was hit with an episode of Ventricular Tachycardia. I would have accepted that this happened due to years of abuse I had subjected my body to. After running batteries of tests, the doctors couldn’t find anything minimally significant that could explain this. So my doctor did what I guess they do best. They ensured that my entire family had a fear of the devil instilled in them.
“It may happen tomorrow, and it may never happen again,” he said. “Get an AICD implanted so that if it happens again, it can deliver a shock to the heart preventing sudden cardiac death.” All opinions seemed to point to it being the cool thing to do nowadays — carry your defibrillator under the collar bone.
So nothing I did caused this. Nothing I didn’t do caused this. The outcomes of my life are so extremely outside of my control that I have to carry a permanent implant in my body. “You may never need it,” he added.
My family did much more research and started walking on eggshells around me. Carrying a pillow is stress-inducing, and bending to pick up something I drop can increase my heart rate. My wife slapped a smartwatch on my wrist (it is significant to mention that I hate wearing watches) 24 X 7 to measure my heartbeat.
Everyone wanted to pep me up, and there were examples of football players playing the premier league with this implant thrown at me. Relatives I had never heard of started coming out of the woodwork, telling my family and me they had implants.
So I am depressed. I tried to do the right things, stay out of the rain and storm, and get hit by lightning anyways. My mind knows that it’s a practically prudent choice. But I cannot get my heart to come to terms with the fact that one, I will be handicapped for the next three months (cannot lift my left arm — try it), and two, at 42, a freak cardiac incident announced that I am now officially old! And I need an implant, no less!
I am depressed because I am not doing this because I want to have a gadget implanted in my body that can connect to a smartphone and deliver a kick in the chest should I ever get excited. I am doing this because I cannot live a life where everyone around me is continuously worried and handcuffing me out of fear of a repeat.
I am depressed that this breaks my record of never being admitted to a hospital since I came out in 1980.
I am depressed because my whole worldview of controlling my destiny has crashed. The most basic outcomes are indeterminate, and I keep asking myself what the point was of anything good I ever did.
