Shit, my A-fib – Cardiac Atrial fibrillation – is back. The Cardioversion, that I was so hopeful about, didn’t take.

In a strange way, I feel both betrayed by my doctor and I want her to do exactly what she did. Betrayed because she gave me such hope that a Cardioversion would work when the chances of it working were so slim with a heart that has a replacement aortic valve, like mine. And happy because I have a doctor who is positive, hopeful, and very pro-active. Now I am looking forward to an Atrial Fibrillation Ablation on July 17th. (According to the dictionary, Ablation means the removal or melting away of an unwanted structure or tissue and I can’t help but think of that scene in India Jones where the Nazis’ faces melt off.)

I’ll end this with a long quote from Adam Gopnik in an article on aging – or the prolonging of aging to be more accurate. As part of the research on said aging, the researchers developed an aging suit and his description of the suit is a good description of the physical side of growing old.

Slowly pulling on the aging suit and then standing up—it looks a bit like one of the spacesuits that the Russian cosmonauts wore—you’re at first conscious merely of a little extra weight, a little loss of feeling, a small encumbrance or two at the extremities. Soon, though, it’s actively infuriating. The suit bends you. It slows you. You come to realize what makes it a powerful instrument of emotional empathy: every small task becomes effortful. “Reach up to the top shelf and pick up that mug,” Coughlin orders, and doing so requires more attention than you expected. You reach for the mug instead of just getting it. Your emotional cast, as focussed task piles on focussed task, becomes one of annoyance; you acquire the same set-mouthed, unhappy, watchful look you see on certain elderly people on the subway. The concentration that each act requires disrupts the flow of life, which you suddenly become aware is the happiness of life, the ceaseless flow of simple action and responses, choices all made simultaneously and mostly without effort.

The annoyance, after a half hour or so in the suit, tips over into anger: Damn, what’s wrong with the world? (Never: What’s wrong with me?) The suit makes us aware not so much of the physical difficulties of old age, which can be manageable, but of the mental state disconcertingly associated with it—the price of age being perpetual aggravation. The theme and action and motive of King Lear suddenly become perfectly clear. You become enraged at your youngest daughter’s reticence because you have had to struggle to unroll the map of your kingdom.