Free Falling Backwards: A Memoir by Jann Arden Page A

wreck and my mom was getting annoyed with me, I could tell. She thought I was being silly and I really, truly wanted to believe that I was just being silly. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe I had pulled a muscle?
    When my heart finally felt normal again, I was relieved, to say the least. I wouldn’t dive so far under the water next time, I thought to myself; that was what had done it. I figured that would be the end of it. But my heart was never the same after that. For years it did strange things. It would suddenly start to speed out of control for no reason at all. I would raise my arm up to get a glass out of the cupboard and my heart would start beating like crazy. It always scared me. I’d lie down and put my feet up and pinch my nose shut to try to get it to slow down. It usually worked, but that still didn’t explain why it was happening in the first place. I tried explaining what it felt like to my mother, but I couldn’t quite find the right words. I never felt any sort of pain; it was like I had a frightened bird caught underneath my rib cage. Whatever it was, it was stealing my confidence.
    My mom took me to our family doctor and he said that, in his professional opinion, it was all in my mind, which was maddening. He told my mom that it was quite normal for adolescents to experience odd cardiovascular behaviour, and that it was part of puberty as far as he was concerned. He told us that it would get better as I got older. As he butted his cigarette out in the ashtray on his desk, he told me not to think about it so much. I thought he was completelynuts, and so did my mother. I badly wanted to believe that it would go away eventually and that nothing was wrong with me, but somewhere deep down I knew something wasn’t right.
    My cardiovascular problems didn’t go away; in fact, they started getting worse. My heart took off like a rocket on a much more regular basis. The weird part was that at night, when I lay down to go to sleep, it was just the opposite. My heart felt like it was going to stop. It would beat so slowly that I found myself taking giant gasps of air to try and keep it going. Sometimes I thought that if I went to sleep I’d never wake up, so I had to stay up to keep my heart pumping. I was too young to be an insomniac, but that’s what I was becoming.
    If I had thought I could drink coffee and not end up with the runs like my dad, I would have started drinking three pots of the stuff a day. People were always saying that coffee kept them up at night; I needed some of that. I would wake up in the middle of the night to make sure I was alive. I usually was. Good thing I woke myself up, I’d think to myself. It was all a bit crazy, but I really felt like I had to will my heart to beat at night, that I had to think about it every second or else it would stop. I was exhausted most mornings. I sat on the heat vent while my mom braided my hair and worried about having to go to sleep again that night.
    My mom dragged me around to all kinds of cardiologists, none of whom could tell me what was going on with me. My mom was so good about all the doctors’ appointments. She never doubted that I had a problem, and that kept me sane most days. She never once told me I was making my heart problems up. She knew me better than that.
    One cardiologist told me that I had something called tachycardia, and that it was a condition caused by the sports I was doing. He told me that perhaps it would be best if I were to forgo any athletic endeavours. I wasn’t about to do that. I remember my mothertelling him that she thought it important that I get as much exercise as possible, all things considered. She thought I should be keeping my heart as strong as possible. He looked at her like she was a filing cabinet.
    This whole doctor thing went on for six or seven years. I had basically resigned myself to the fact that I had a weird heart and nobody knew what to do about it. My friends were getting used to me lying