Supraventricular Tachycardia /// ?

Last fall in the beginning of my sophomore year of college here at the oh so prestigious University of Minnesota, I found myself in a hospital and with a heart that had an arrhythmia that sounded like free form jazz.

Doctors, the wielders of scientific knowledge and practice, have not been able to diagnose or treat my heart condition. Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT) is a self diagnosis on my part by using the internet (WebMD) to diagnose myself with it. It's a broadly defined heart disorder and a fancy word for heart arrhythmia that is usually not lethal. I've had a heart monitor implanted in my chest and multiple procedures including one where they put electrodes on your heart to stimulate it. Those were doctors orders. The effects of these procedures produced were a mixed cocktail that made me feel comforted by the most cutting edge of medical diagnostic procedures but also a great deal of anxiety because science could not give me a conclusive, concise, reduced diagnosis and miracle pills to cure what I experience. I trust modern medicine a lot, it has helped my mom who has been chronically ill since the age of 18 with diseases and sicknesses ranging from a severe case of Chron's disease, skin cancer, blood clots in her brain, kidney stones, to severe lethal cases of any common sickness like strep throat or pink eye (a consequence of her Chron's disease which is autoimmune). More on that later though.

My symptoms consist of near fainting, a pounding heart which I can feel almost always, loss of motor skills, sleeplessness, severe anxiety, dizziness, nausea, pains in my chest, blurred vision, just to name a few. It happens with out warning at any time of the day.

The professional that I see here at the U, after putting me on several medications that had terrible side affects, simply put it that the best way for me to cope with my disorder is to "understand that it is mind over matter."

In a day and age where something like WebMD exists, people are constantly (over)analyzing their health. There's a disease or disorder for everything it seems. You can spend a day looking through the webpages of WebMD and the diagnose checkers and end up thinking that you have schizophrenia, ulcers, early stages of uterine cancer, and a whole plethora of diseases and disorders. I'm sure you can imagine, my imagination seems to lacking at the moment to shed light on the malarkey behind WebMD. WebMD is a prime form of modern, scientific reductionism that gives simple linear checklists that have serious consequences of promoting hypochondria in our society today.

I feel like I used WebMD out of jest. It was like spinning a bingo wheel to see what crazy ten syllable word would come out of it. The description of SVT still doesn't quite fulfill a lot of my symptoms. My professional cardiologist (or now psychologist) talks to me more about how I like it here at the U and interesting humorous anecdotes about medicine and the field of medicine, than we talk about my heart. He seems to be aware of the boundaries of what science and medicine has to offer. I feel like the culture behind being sick has been more destructive and anxiety inducing than anything else. I feel like when I express that I am sick or that I don't feel well, I need to express it in two or three word terms like everybody else does. People get really concerned when I don't (sometimes I do just tell them SVT if I'm feeling introverted).

My mom is one of the sickest people I've ever known as I've mentioned before. She results to rarely talking about her sicknesses with other people because people often let her know that she is lucky to be alive. My mom knows this but I know she doesn't like to be reminded all the time that she "should be" dead according to doctors and popular held belief. Doctors told her when she was 18 that she would not live past the age of 25. And then when she was 25, they told her 30, and then when she was 30, they told her 35. After that they gave up that shtick. Anyways, long story short, my mother's life has been constructed incredibly with the aid of science and with that an anxiety ridden life of what will happen next. Doctor's to some extent have made my mother's life a worrisome, future oriented ordeal.