A Life of Waiting for a Normal Beat and Rhythm

Dr. Kateryna Metersky is an Assistant Professor at the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She is also a practicing nurse in General Internal Medicine at University Health Network - Toronto Western Hospital. As an educator, she continuously strives to develop innovative ways to enrich the educational experience for her students, and one such method is through the use of poetry in the classroom. Dr. Metersky enjoys composing poetry to explain difficult and theoretical concepts to nursing and interprofessional students, as well as patients in her care. She crafted this poem to help students understand what it is like for patients to live with heart disease. Dr. Metersky received the diagnosis of non-sustained ventricular tachycardia in 2019 and has experienced uncertainty living with this chronic illness. To this day, Dr. Metersky is still seeking a solution for this diagnosis that will help her live well with this condition. 

I sit here waiting

Waiting for that “episode” to happen

Pregnant with my third

I faint

Breastfeeding my third

I faint

Blood rushes out of my body

It feels like life is still

I’m frozen

It feels like I am gone for hours

But it’s just 10 seconds

Not long

But enough

Enough for me to shiver

My heart restarts

I feel the blood rushing back to my brain

I feel alive, but what is this?

This can’t be normal, can it?

It scares me, but as a nurse, I ignore it

I’m still alive, so life is good

But at the same time, I’m curious

So, I sit here waiting

Waiting to see if this comes back

My partner pushes me to seek medical advice

I am placed on a two-week Holter monitor

I am eating

Sitting on my balcony and eating dinner with my family

I faint

This time I have a monitor on

It shows non-sustained ventricular tachycardia

NSVT?

NSVT!

A diagnosis, I now have a diagnosis

It is scary, although not a grave diagnosis

But scary

What next, what do I do?

Electrophysiologist, echocardiogram, MRI,

Blood work, electrocardiogram,

Stress test, more monitoring

Suspected previous myocarditis

Some structural abnormalities

But nothing concrete that points to the cause

I sit here waiting, waiting for the next “episode”

Hoping I make it through

I faint

Each season I faint

I can feel it come on, so I prepare

I sit and wait to faint

I almost always do

When my heart starts beating rapidly

Hammering at my chest wall

Then ceasing to beat

I faint

I almost always do

But what can I do?

Bisoprolol failed

Made me feel worse

Dropped my blood pressure too low

I could not use it

Ablation failed

The arrhythmia could not be induced

So, what can I do?

I have three kids

A career, aspirations

A life I want to live

A partner I want to grow old with

A world to travel and see

They insert now a loop monitor

This time it is inside of me

A part of me, it’s my identify

I am a mother, sister, daughter

A nurse, professor, researcher

A friend

But now a lifelong patient

So, I sit here waiting

Waiting for the “episode” to come

I wait to faint

So my monitor can show

Show them what I feel

Show them what they need

To perhaps make this nightmare go away

For the faints to cease

For my life to go on

For the waiting to stop

For now, I sit here waiting

For the solution to come

While my heart is still beating

I continue to sit here waiting