Don’t Visit a Cardiologist for Affairs of the Heart
Short fiction that is barely clinical.
As my cardiologist strapped the Holter monitor to my chest, I told him my heart might be broken.
“Really?” He stifled a chuckle. “That’s why you came to see me?”
Yes, I told him. I was in love with this girl —
“Girl? I don’t treat pederasts! Helen!”
I quickly clarified that I meant a woman.
My cardiologist clutched his chest. “Don’t give me a heart attack when I’m the only cardiologist on staff!”
The exam room door opened and a nurse poked her head in.
“False alarm, Helen,” my cardiologist said. Helen shut the door, but not before I noticed she was holding a large mallet. “Please continue.”
I explained that Judy and I went out on our first date after a few weeks of some pretty pleasant texting. We were still strangers but had already reached levels of intimacy and vulnerability and authenticity I’d never achieved with a woman before. When we finally met in person, she looked even better than she looked on the dating app and everything went swimmingly — I did use that word, “swimmingly.” Throughout the date I found myself moving through time from the past of our texts to the present of our moment in the bar to a future of optimism and anniversaries and meeting parents and friends and long-term plans, and the date ended with a kiss—a real kiss, not a cousin-kiss.
But before we could set up a second date she said she had to break things off.
My cardiologist asked why and I said it was a mystery to me. She’d said, “I’m not ready for this,” or something. And my heart’s been hurting ever since.
My cardiologist crossed his arms. “Are you sure it’s not a problem with your mind?”
I said I’d already visited my brain specialist, who told me it was a heart issue.
“Who was the brain specialist?”
Dr. Fisher.
“Carl Fisher? That son of a bitch!” He rolled his chair over to the window and peeked through the closed blinds. Satisfied, he rolled back toward me, stopping when he was a few inches from my face.
“I’ve been working on a surgical procedure for just your situation. It’s still in the experimental phase but I’ll do it. I can remove the part of your heart that’s connected to this Judy woman. You’ll never ache for her again. Come to the surgery center next week. Helen will give you the paperwork. Helen!”
I asked if the procedure was safe.
“It’s experimental,” he repeated as Helen entered the room. She was carrying a crowbar. “Not that, Helen. Set this patient up for surgery next week.”
I asked if I should still wear the Holter monitor.
“Throw it away. Those things don’t do dick.”
A week after the surgery, I started feeling very nauseous, so I went to the emergency room. After a battery of tests, the emergency room physician broke the news.
“You have an atrial septal defect.”
Which means?
“You have a hole in your heart. This is a common birth defect, but rather uncommon for someone your age. Unheard of, actually, under your circumstances. It looks like someone scraped a piece of your heart out of your body. Which would also explain that large surgical scar across your chest.”
I shrugged.
“You need to have surgery immediately. Your heart is drowning in its own blood.”
Soon after I recovered from that surgery, I burst into my cardiologist’s office, a crowbar in one hand and a mallet in the other. Helen ran in after me.
“I’m sorry, doctor,” she said. “I tried to stop him but he disarmed me.”
“No worries,” my cardiologist said calmly. He leaned back in his chair and tented his hands. “I’m guessing you ended up with the hole in your heart. Unfortunately, it’s one of the side effects. The other potential side effect is death, so I’d say you made it out okay.”
I said nothing.
“Have you been thinking about Judy?”
I told him I hadn’t —
“Success!”
— but there was a part of me that kind of missed the pain, like when you have a loose tooth and you push on it and the nerve aches and throbs but you push it anyway.
“Listen, I’m not qualified to remove any Judy-teeth. But I know a guy — ”
I told him that wasn’t the point.
He nodded. “I know what you mean,” he said. “Unfortunately, the procedure isn’t reversible, especially after whatever those butchers did to you when they plugged up your heart-hole. But I have the next best thing.”
He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a mason jar and put it on his desk. Suspended in a clear liquid was a strand of dark flesh that resembled a piece of roast pork in the lo mein I had every week.
“This is Judy,” my cardiologist said. “Or at least the part of your heart connected to Judy.”
I returned the weapons to Helen and took the jar.
Starting that evening and around the same time every evening for the rest of the summer, I’d sit on my stoop with a whiskey, thumbing through dating-site profiles. When I’d reach a swipe-right-worthy profile picture, I’d look over at the mason jar next to me, the Judy-flesh slowly summersaulting at her own leisurely pace in a rainbow prism formed by the rays of the setting sun, then swipe left.
