(“Can you get back within a day?”), with beta blockers, antiarrhythmics, and the blood thinner Coumadin in hand, Anne and I head up to Maine, one of our favorite places this side of the Atlantic.
I often get the jitters before speaking, and as I prepare to address this gathering of a hundred or so bread enthusiasts, I recognize that familiar tight feeling in my gut. Well, not exactly the gut. A little higher . . . to the left . . . that’s the spot. AFib is often confused with or feels like palpitations, which themselves are often associated with anxiety, so even though there is no hard clinical evidence that anxiety is connected with AFib, whenever I feel anything the least bit unusual in my chest—a little tightening of the gut, a skipped beat, a taco—my left hand flies up to my neck, where I’ve gotten very good at locating my pulse at the carotid artery, and I need only two beats to confirm that I’m in rhythm.
I’ve been doing this probably a couple of dozen times a day since my last impersonation of Frankenstein receiving the high-voltage gift of life (“It lives!!!”), and when I do it in public or even (rather, especially) in Anne’s presence, I’ve developed a technique designed to make it seem as if I’m just casually tending to an itch on my neck. I know this compulsive pulse taking is counterproductive behavior, but I can’t seem to help it, so fearful am I of returning to arrhythmia, to the hospital, to the DieHard. The anticipation of recurrence is almost worse than the AFib. Thus I’ve taken the doctor’s advice to stay off alcohol. No
vin,
no
bière,
no Grand Marnier. How very un-French! And un-fun.
The talk goes well, and my heart, thank God, is none the worse for it. Afterward, Anne and I drive down to Monmouth, a small town whose landmark is Cumston Hall, a wildly eccentric Romanesque / Queen Anne – style building that has been restored for use as a theater. We go there whenever we’re in the area, no matter what’s playing, because the repertory company is good and the theater is amazing, the ceiling adorned with cherubs and intricate plaster carvings, and it is
the
place to be for anyone who’s part of, or aspires to be part of (oxymoron alert), central Maine society.
Tonight’s performance happens to be
Tartuffe; or,
Th
e Imposter,
the French farce by Molière, the seventeenth-century French comic dramatist who is to France what Shakespeare is to England, only funnier. Molière was a fierce satirist of French social manners, customs, hypocrisy, and society in general, as well as of the idiosyncrasies of the still-nascent French language, which especially endears him to me. The plot of
Tartuffe
centers around a holier-than-thou religious charlatan who uses his pious position within a family to seduce both the husband’s wife and his daughter right under the husband’s nose. The play had a run of exactly one performance, at Versailles in 1664, closing after the archbishop of Paris turned in, shall we say, a bad review to King Louis XIV. As the archbishop happened to be Louis’s confessor, the king might have felt a little extra pressure to accede to his wishes.
Religious hypocrisy and seduction of the worst kind being alive and well some 350 years later,
Tartuffe
is still topical, fresh, and quite funny, though the distraction isn’t enough to keep me from occasionally surreptitiously monitoring the beating of my heart. I mentioned earlier that I’ve always felt an affinity to Molière, but the comparison suddenly seems more apt than I’d intended, for in between acts and pulse checks, I learn from the program that Molière spent much of his life in poor health and in the company of doctors, who were unsuccessful in treating his chronic illnesses, which is unsurprising, given that the favored treatments of the day were bloodletting and leeches. As we writers like to say, rotten luck but good material; Molière’s experiences with doctors provided him with enough fodder
I often get the jitters before speaking, and as I prepare to address this gathering of a hundred or so bread enthusiasts, I recognize that familiar tight feeling in my gut. Well, not exactly the gut. A little higher . . . to the left . . . that’s the spot. AFib is often confused with or feels like palpitations, which themselves are often associated with anxiety, so even though there is no hard clinical evidence that anxiety is connected with AFib, whenever I feel anything the least bit unusual in my chest—a little tightening of the gut, a skipped beat, a taco—my left hand flies up to my neck, where I’ve gotten very good at locating my pulse at the carotid artery, and I need only two beats to confirm that I’m in rhythm.
I’ve been doing this probably a couple of dozen times a day since my last impersonation of Frankenstein receiving the high-voltage gift of life (“It lives!!!”), and when I do it in public or even (rather, especially) in Anne’s presence, I’ve developed a technique designed to make it seem as if I’m just casually tending to an itch on my neck. I know this compulsive pulse taking is counterproductive behavior, but I can’t seem to help it, so fearful am I of returning to arrhythmia, to the hospital, to the DieHard. The anticipation of recurrence is almost worse than the AFib. Thus I’ve taken the doctor’s advice to stay off alcohol. No
vin,
no
bière,
no Grand Marnier. How very un-French! And un-fun.
The talk goes well, and my heart, thank God, is none the worse for it. Afterward, Anne and I drive down to Monmouth, a small town whose landmark is Cumston Hall, a wildly eccentric Romanesque / Queen Anne – style building that has been restored for use as a theater. We go there whenever we’re in the area, no matter what’s playing, because the repertory company is good and the theater is amazing, the ceiling adorned with cherubs and intricate plaster carvings, and it is
the
place to be for anyone who’s part of, or aspires to be part of (oxymoron alert), central Maine society.
Tonight’s performance happens to be
Tartuffe; or,
Th
e Imposter,
the French farce by Molière, the seventeenth-century French comic dramatist who is to France what Shakespeare is to England, only funnier. Molière was a fierce satirist of French social manners, customs, hypocrisy, and society in general, as well as of the idiosyncrasies of the still-nascent French language, which especially endears him to me. The plot of
Tartuffe
centers around a holier-than-thou religious charlatan who uses his pious position within a family to seduce both the husband’s wife and his daughter right under the husband’s nose. The play had a run of exactly one performance, at Versailles in 1664, closing after the archbishop of Paris turned in, shall we say, a bad review to King Louis XIV. As the archbishop happened to be Louis’s confessor, the king might have felt a little extra pressure to accede to his wishes.
Religious hypocrisy and seduction of the worst kind being alive and well some 350 years later,
Tartuffe
is still topical, fresh, and quite funny, though the distraction isn’t enough to keep me from occasionally surreptitiously monitoring the beating of my heart. I mentioned earlier that I’ve always felt an affinity to Molière, but the comparison suddenly seems more apt than I’d intended, for in between acts and pulse checks, I learn from the program that Molière spent much of his life in poor health and in the company of doctors, who were unsuccessful in treating his chronic illnesses, which is unsurprising, given that the favored treatments of the day were bloodletting and leeches. As we writers like to say, rotten luck but good material; Molière’s experiences with doctors provided him with enough fodder
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