Fore!

I am not a golfer—never have been, don’t expect that I ever will be. But for some reason as I was thinking of a way to compose this post, the interjection, “Fore!” jumped into my head as a summary of the holding pattern I find our lives in at the moment.

Golfers will yell “Fore!” because it sounds a lot nicer than, “Hey you! I’m sending a hard round object in your direction so you might want to pay attention in case your head manages to intercept its path,” or some similar sentiment. I guess they could also yell, “Yo!” or “Ho!” or any other attention getting phrase (Except “Fire!” That one would probably only cause confusion on a golf course.).

But I digress.

Right now I feel like the Universe has just yelled, “Fore!” and I’m sitting here waiting to see whether I’m going to get beaned in the noggin or the impending strike will miss me entirely. What the hell am I talking about? Well, tomorrow morning we go for Mr. Moo’s annual cardiology appointment, which is normally not more than a blip on our radar. We go in, the nurse does a little EKG action and praises Mr. Moo for not fidgeting at all, and then the doctor comes in, takes a listen (usually has a few med students take a listen, too) and then we’re on our way. Easy breezy.

For those feeling like you are coming in at mid-story with no idea what the heck I am talking about, you’re not confused. Really. I just never posted about Mr. Moo having a ventral septal defect (VSD) because it was so small and so innocuous that it was hardly worth mentioning. In fact, I thought about it so little that I would forget to tell doctors that had never seen him before and only remember when they got an alarmed look on their face while doing an exam (physics lesson—liquid passing through a small hole causes a LOT of turbulence, so you can both feel the vibrations if you touch his chest as well as hear a loud WHOOSH WHOOSH if you put your ear to his heart—no fancy medical listening devices needed).

Anyway, last year at our easy breezy appointment, the extra test du jour was a chest x-ray (the previous year it had been an hour-long echocardiogram—whee!). No one expected to see anything of note, but as it turns out, Mr. Moo’s heart had become larger. When the doctor told us, I almost choked because only a few weeks earlier, our friends had lost their child unexpectedly, and one of the things found at autopsy was an enlarged heart. I think the doctor saw my panicked look because he calmly told us that what he would like to do is wait until this year’s appointment to make a decision on how to proceed. In explaining further, he said that if his heart gets any larger (and for the life of me I can’t remember if it was also that if it didn’t get smaller, sang the blues, or a number of other idiosyncrasies) they would have to repair the hole. Small hole. Should be simple. But the location combined with the design of the heart means that repair involves open heart surgery and heart-bypass machines. None of which you want to use in reference to your just-turned-four-years-old little boy.

I expect that we will have an answer before we leave the appointment tomorrow, so I’ll know in less than 24-hours whether the Universe has clocked me a good one. But in the meantime, we just sit in our little corner and wait. And I may obsess a bit, so if I seem distracted, you’ll know why.