Heartfelt Shock
I was around a lot of people today who were having some laughs at Dick Cheney’s expense. Like the rest of us, they had heard that the Vice-President had been hospitalized and had been given an electrical shock to bring him out of an irregular heart beat.
I’m no fan of the Veep as any reader here knows. But I have to tell you that I didn’t share in the glee today over his predicament.
I suffer the same sort of occasional arrhythmia that Cheney does. If you read deep into the article linked above you’ll see he has an implanted defibrillator to guard against a very dangerous irregular heart beat that generates in the lower part of his heart. That’s the same condition I developed last year, more or less out of the blue. I’ve also got the same digital hi-tech implant (leading me to joke that I’ve always wanted a Republican heart and now I’ve finally got one).
Mine was implanted last May after my heart, without provocation, suddenly started to race at 180 beats per minute– well more than double a healthy rate– and after I was administered the exact same sort of shock in the local ER to bring it down. The shock works, fortunately, about 99% of the time. And the defib implant is there to deliver a wallop if things again bounce out of control. In my case, I’m happy to report, my pulse has been seriously steady ever since and no such dramatic theatrics have been necessary.
The one-time shock I got back in May was enough to last me a life-time. Not that I felt it. I felt nothing. The doc had pasted on the defib electrodes to my chest and back and was slowly preparing the procedure. There was no hurry because I had been stable in the ER for a couple of hours and he was still hoping that some drugs he had injected would slow down my heart. “If they don’t work soon,” he said as the electrodes were put in place. “We’ll put you out for a few seconds just long enough to give you the shock.”
No sooner had he finished that sentence when my blood pressure started to dive. I felt cold, numb and my bubble of consciousness was quickly closing. The doc stood there with his finger on the button, waited until the precise moment I blacked out and then he popped me. An instant later, literally, I was wide awake, feeling great and with a perfect cardiac sine wave pumping at a leisurely 72 bpm. He didn’t have to put me out — I was going all on my own. He simply timed the jolt perfectly.
But what a horrifying experience — one I think about, oh, seven or eight times every day. Worse, however, is recalling the hours right before the shock. For those who have never experienced it, there are few words to describe the desperation felt when your heart is hammering away, you’re flushed, breathless and scared stiff. And right there in front of you your loved ones are staring you in the eyes, trying not to betray their own cold terror, wondering if you’re gonna make it another five minutes.
It’s not something I would wish on anyone. Not even on Dick Cheney and his otherwise not so warm and fuzzy family.
That said, I also know — at least as well as one can know second-hand– what it feels like to be submitted to torture. Too many people I have known from my time in Chile have described to me the sensation of having electrodes applied to their genitals, or their head dunked into water, or an unloaded gun clicked at their temple.
We also know that some of these methods of torture have been approved, even celebrated by the same Vice-President who spent part of today in the hospital.
I wonder as the wires were being attached to his own chest today if Dick Cheney had as much as a fleeting thought about those we have stripped of all human rights and all human dignity and whom we have submitted to what we prefer to call “rough interrogation” but is, indeed, torture.
Somehow, I doubt it.
November 26th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
¡Ay, chucha!, Marc.
That packed a wallop.
November 27th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Not everyone is entitled to the best heart care in America. It’s a damn dirty shame…isn’t it?
November 27th, 2007 at 2:59 am
180 beats per minute, for no obvious reason, is scary as hell. If the only effect of “setting the conditions for interrogation” was to bring about that state in somebody, there’s no question in my mind you’d have to call it torture. I know. The one time I called an ambulance for myself, 180 beats per minute out of the blue was the reason.
A few minutes before the ambulance arrived, my heart seemed to stop for a second — then resumed with a rather stately rhythm. The EMTs nevertheless had to deal with a patient still shivering in terror, and duly loaded me up. At the hospital, EKG’s revealed nothing out of the ordinary. I was released the same evening, rather mortified to be so “healthy”. Walking back home on a cool autumn evening, I remember thinking that that terrifying interrogations leaving victims only *apparently* unharmed would be enough to sustain a police state.
I haven’t had tachycardia like that since. The above episode was almost 20 years ago. I do have a chronic arhythmia, which seems to have worsened with age, but since starting to swim laps again regularly, it’s been far less mischievous — sometimes I think it’s just that my heart actually *needs* to race sometimes, the way a border collie needs to get out and run, and that the sporadic arhythmia is just the dog’s way of clawing at the door with the leash in its mouth. Aerobic exercise of moderate intensity seems to do the trick. Having a twitchy and neurotic heart, but still being able to do something about it … it’s liberating, in a funny way. Subjects in police states should feel so liberated.
But freedom from fear of government isn’t always liberating enough, by itself.
When I had that major tachycardia episode, I had coverage courtesy of something in California called COBRA — an acronym for Comprehensive Omnibus Reconciliation Act, whatever the hell that was. I somehow imagine it was a thousand pages long. Somewhere in that package of legislation, there was a guarantee of extension of employer-sponsored medical coverage, for about a year and a half (IIRC) after leaving the job. And COBRA got me paid for that stupid ambulance trip. However, I still remember the day I received the card for the coverage — it made me livid. The card had a logo (apparently hand-stamped) of an actual cobra: coiled, hood extended, ready to strike. I had quit the job because I was getting too stressed out, and the tachycardia episode wasn’t long afterward. The tacit message, “We clasped a viper to our bosom” (just because I wanted to continue my coverage, and didn’t feel up to working for a while) wasn’t easy to take.
I haven’t gone to doctors much while living here in Japan, but when I do, it always seems faintly miraculous that I just show a card and end up paying for little more than whatever’s prescribed. The national system isn’t dirt-cheap, but it’s not very expensive either. And even though I’m not a citizen, I have right to it, just by paying what everyone else pays. This is a “freedom from” (fear) that I wouldn’t comfortably surrender. The fact that I would have to surrender it if I decided to go back to the U.S. to live is one of the things that keeps me an expatriate. I love America, but somtimes I wish it would grow up already.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:35 am
During the first attempt by the Clintons to provide a universal health care plan for America the late Sen. Paul wellstone proposed a bill that would give all elected representatives and political appopintees of the President the same health care package as the Congress deemed OK for the country at large. If they did nothing then they would receive nothing. Arlen Specter – then undergoing delicate brain surgery – denounced this as a gimick on the floor of the Senate and cruel as well. That charge has also been leveled at John Edwards who proposed something similiar this year.
When he vetoed the SCHIPS bill George Bush said it was to prevent the “Slide” into “Socialised Medicine”. I’m sure Dick Cheney would concur. You and I pay for his treatment – its a government run single payer plan. But I’m sure the VP would argue that, as was true of the tax cuts, his first class care is only “His due”.
MT is right. He is probably better off if the Land of the Rising Sun as T.R. Reid of the WaPo was right when he noted that his daughter was treated in London immediately for an Ear Infection when he arrived there as a correspondent and, not once, did anyone ask for a dime. Of course, Chjeney and Tancredo and the others in the GOP tell us that hoards of “mexicans cross our border daily to get free medical care.
Pardon me if I don’t share your sympathies for Cheney. I wish no one ill health. But I’d sure feel better knowing that everyone here with those problems got the care they needed. And I don’t.
November 27th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
A temporary interjection:
Marc: I wonder as the wires were being attached to his own chest today if Dick Cheney had as much as a fleeting thought about those we have stripped of all human rights and all human dignity and whom we have submitted to what we prefer to call “rough interrogation” but is, indeed, torture. Somehow, I doubt it.
Marc, this is a real stretch to take a common personal experience of yours and the V.P. and turn it into something against the way we fight terrorism to protect all of America.
Of course, Cheney wouldn’t see the connection of a V.P.’s medical procedure with strong interrogation methods against a terrorist suspect. Who would in that position?
If we really wanted to torture terrorists, we would give them colonoscopies and cystoscopies.
November 27th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
just go and spoil the fun, Marc. Jeez, lots of good people got shot in World War II. Does that mean that when Cheney shot his friend, it wasn’t funny as all get out?
November 27th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
“Marc, this is a real stretch to take a common personal experience of yours and the V.P. and turn it into something against the way we fight terrorism to protect all of America.”
Woody:
Much like Reg – who probably has much more intellect than myself – I am going to swallow my pride and respond to you, Woody, even though I nearly swore at one time that I would never engage in debate with someone so ridiculous.
Marc never used the phrase “the way we fight terrorism to protect all of America,” to describe what interrogators do; Marc used the word “torture”….so I am a little confused, Woodrow: are you now saying – indeed admitting – that torture is “the way we fight terrorism?” If so, I can imagine that there are very few of our soldiers who are bravely fighting who would take much comfort from what you are saying….in fact, you remind me a lot of those hippie protestors from the Vietnam era that you have so frequently denigrated in the past. Here is what my first cousin serving in Basra at the moment would tell you: “We are the best trained fighting force in the world, the U.S. doesn’t need to turn into a ruthless banana republic and use nazi-like interrogation tactics to win the war on terrorism.”…I can always ask him, though…
Marc – very good post. A few of the little kiddos that I teach have mild to moderate forms of mental disabilities, also called by some mental retardation, and I hate when people use the term “retarded” in a derogatory sense, to be funny (sidenote: I recently heard a lefty “progressive” radio commentator calling President Bush that, and yukking it up with his caller). Folks with disabilities have a hard enough life with more challenges than most other people (certainly more than me), and to be used in such a way to attach negativity and stigma to it is classless – as is making fun of Cheney because of his heart problems.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
“I love America, but somtimes I wish it would grow up already.”
I hear ya, Michael, preach on….
November 27th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
When my comments from earlier return from the limbo of moderation I’ll say more. But can you please look into how and why things get moderated because, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. Length or content doesn’t seem to matter so what is it?
November 27th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
richard, figure it out!
You get moderated because you post from Al Qaeda HQ. I never get moderated, because I support “America’s” interrogation techniques,
November 27th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Woody wrote: “Of course, Cheney wouldn’t see the connection of a V.P.’s medical procedure with strong interrogation methods against a terrorist suspect. Who would in that position?”
I wouldn’t, and neither did Marc, who was not talking about any such connection. He was taking about a state of fear and suffering. Duh.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
yeah, “terrorist suspect”…putting aside the fact that shocking a “suspect”s genitals with electrical cords, sicking dogs on him/her, and filling their lungs up with water so that they choke violently surpasses our founders’ standard of “cruel and unusual punishment,” it is a real sorry ass state of affairs that no mainstream media outlet underscores – and I mean underscores – the fact that both the International Red Cross and Amnesty International have concluded that most of those “interrogees” were found later to be innocent civilians thrown into trucks because they all looked the same….I cannot be certain, but I want to say that one of those international agencies said that as many as 90% of the people tortured in US custody were found to be innocent of any crime…put that in your pipe and smoke it.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Marc: I wonder as the wires were being attached to his own chest today if Dick Cheney had as much as a fleeting thought about those we have stripped of all human rights and all human dignity and whom we have submitted to what we prefer to call “rough interrogation†but is, indeed, torture. Somehow, I doubt it.
I doubt it too, very seriously. That’s why I hope that your debrillator keeps on keeping on, and Cheney’s…
November 27th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
What I meant to say, of course, is that they gave Cheney a debrillator and not a defibrillator.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:59 am
“I wonder as the wires were being attached to his own chest today if Dick Cheney had as much as a fleeting thought about those we have stripped of all human rights and all human dignity and whom we have submitted to what we prefer to call “rough interrogation” but is, indeed, torture”
I do swear Marc. You are definitely a political animal, from birth I’ll bet.
My guess, given Cheney is a different species of political animal than you(are we born with our political bent at birth?), he would be thinking much like you above, but with an importance and significant difference that defines right thinking from left…..just change the ‘we’ in your thinking above to ‘they’.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Michael Balter:
Trust me: Cheney has a deFIBrillator.
I would be content if he wondered how lucky he is to have excellent health care when 40+ million of his own citizens do not.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
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