“I’m not having a heart attack,” I said. But no one listened.
Things move fast when you show up at emergency complaining of chest pain and trouble breathing. So many people checked me out, poking and slapping wires and sticky pads all over the place, that I felt like a cookie crumb at an ant picnic.
I’d told them they could rule out heart attack, right from the start, when the triage nurse asked what I’d been doing when the pain started.
“I was rolling down a hill, and I heard a pop,” I said.
She hesitated, but wrote it down. I don’t recall her asking WHY I was rolling down the hill. And I was so focused on getting a breath, that I didn’t think to tell her I’d spent the morning with my grandbeans, at the playground with the bungalow-high hill plunk in the middle—the perfect rolling hill.
I heard the POP deep in my chest, about three rotations down.
I remember thinking that it wasn’t a good sound, that perhaps I should have left the rolling-down-the-hill-part to the little ones.
Much later, after all that testing proved me right, the X-Ray technician studied my chart. “Rolling down the hill,” he said slowly, adding almost hesitantly, “Um…and were you alone at the time?”
Suddenly I realized I’d just upped the ante for oddball admissions. No wonder so many staff had checked me out.
Some of them may have also, this past winter, have checked out my friend, Noreen. She’s another Nana who forgot her age—a slight bout of amnesia that resulted in a complicated collarbone break during an afternoon of tobogganing with her own grandchildren. She’s still recovering from surgery, and trying to getting used to the steel plate doctors used to repair her.
Fools on the hill, both of us. And, oh, Lord, there are lots of us out there; nanas (and poppas) so in love with our grandchildren we forget our own birth years–and brittling bones.
God, protect not only our little ones, but all the Nanas who forget they’re not. Because at our funerals our heart’s desire is that our grandkids rise up and call us blessed—not that they stand up and sing…“Pop goes the Nana.”
