deacair

I have named my carrot-shaped heart-sitting aneurysm “Deacair.” (That’s Dee-care.)

It’s the Irish Gaelic word for “inconvenient.”

If one must have a fellow traveler, why not give it a name? The thing I can’t decide on is its personality. Is it a monster, like the demon sitting on the airplane wing from that creepy show, trying to kill everyone and everything aboard? Is it a little Gizmo, hoping you won’t feed it so it doesn’t have to turn into a gremlin? Is it just going to sit there and do nothing, or is it going to cause trouble? Whose side is it in; does it WANT to kill its host? Viruses don’t. Why couldn’t I have just gotten sick?

That’s the problem with a malfunctioning part. You’re not sick–until it malfunctions. And it won’t malfunction unless it gets big enough to block blood (they tend to be bigger than 5 mm for that, and Deacair is 4.5 at the big end.) Or you pick up something and strain yourself unexpectedly, or hold your breath while straining, or something scares you suddenly….

It’s a little bit like playing Russian Roulette with a heart valve, and at the same time it’s one of the most normal abnormalities ever. One in 100,000 people has one of these–although they’re all over the place: thoracic, abdominal, aortic. Little carrots (or windmills or pebbles or even hearts) gumming up the works in your bloodworks.

Annoying, they are. Everlasting, too, because you’ve got to deal with the fact that something is sitting there and it’s not going away and it’s not a good idea to go randomly in and fix it surgically because that introduces all kinds of fun new complications like infection. But all you want is for the last day you didn’t have a problem to be the way you live now. So you don’t have to think twice before shoveling dirt, or diving into a lake, or otherwise living your best life now.

So you go ahead and live your best life, because popping an aneurysm is not on your list of things to do today.

Except you might not be in charge of that list anymore. Control freaks with aneurysms are grumpy, conflicted people, folks. It’s a little claustrophobic and a little freaky and it can’t be what occupies your mind or you’ll go nuts.

And it’s inconvenient. So it’s not so much “welcome Deacair” as “ok Deacair, what do you want?”

Sigh.