Eight Fascinating Facts About the Heart
1. Most heart attacks happen in the early morning hours.
In the pre-dawn silence, before the sun wrests the veils of frost from our windows, I hear someone running down the hall—small, naked feet sprinting toward my bed. I’m only half awake, half expectant, but when I feel the mattress dip under the pressure of new weight and a warm body pressed against my back, I know it’s my son and I know he’s had another bad dream. Maybe it’s Captain Hook again or Shredder, the knife-toting villain from the Ninja Turtles. Maybe it’s Bill Cipher, the evil yellow triangle from his favorite cartoon, Gravity Falls, with his top hat, bow tie, and one big unblinking eye. Or perhaps his nightmares have become more real, like the ones that jog me awake: Men with guns kicking down the door, a sadistic serial killer standing over me while I sleep, the house catching fire in the middle of the night, all of us—my husband, my son, and I—dying in a metal-buckling car crash. I hope he hasn’t realized yet that these things are possible. He’s only eight and I want him to think for now that he’ll always be safe and protected and that monsters live only in closets and under beds. I want him to believe the lie I tell him: Mommy won’t let anything bad happen to you.
2. A heart can continue to beat even after it’s disconnected from the body.
I read somewhere that having a child is like having your heart live outside your body. An odd thing to imagine: Your heart sprouts arms and legs and then is pushed out, bloody and screaming to meet the world. You cradle your heart, feed it, stay up late nights watching your heart sleep, every now and again pressing your ear against it to be sure it’s still beating: buh-dum, buh-dum, buh-dum. Soon, your heart is big, walking on its own and talking back. Slippery and fragile, your heart walks down the driveway and jumps onto the school bus, without you. During the day you have no idea how your heart’s doing—if it’s hungry, if it’s sad. Your heart might get pushed around by other hearts or be sitting lonely underneath the jungle gym wishing another heart would play with it. Your heart could be sick, or crying, or breaking and you wouldn’t even know it. You become a little more helpless the more it grows, but all you know is you need your heart to live, and now your most vital organ is moving through the world alone.
3. Scientists believe fear can actually cause a heart attack, especially in people who are already at risk.
My husband likes to say I’m probably going to worry myself to death. I’ve been this way since childhood when any unexpected noise in the night would jolt me out of sleep and leave me paralyzed, staring up at the canopy of my four-poster bed while I waited for a dark figure to enter my room and kill me. More than once, I was so scared to move that I decided to make peace with my imagined fate, close my eyes, and go back to sleep, always surprised in the morning to find I was still alive.
After I had my son, my anxiety escalated. The Sunday I went into the hospital to have my labor induced, I only had myself to worry about. Before that, if I were walking back to my car in a dark parking lot, I’d hold my keys firmly in my fist, the pointy ends sticking out between my fingers, ready to defend myself. But after my son was born everything changed. When I was in a dark parking lot strapping my fussy newborn into his car seat, I was always keenly aware that with my body angled that way, someone could approach me from behind without me ever seeing them, leaving me and my son vulnerable.
4. The beating sound is caused by the heart’s valves opening and closing, which keeps blood flowing in the right direction.
When my son was four, I talked to a therapist about my anxiety. We met in an office she rented from someone else, so the few knickknacks lying around weren’t helpful in my analysis of her. What I did decide from her makeup-free face and casual sweaters was she was honest but unprofessional, which made me trust her when she expressed concern for me but doubt her when she gave me advice. She asked me what I was afraid of, and I told her my major concern was being murdered in my home by some unknown psychopath, but I admitted I also thought a lot about being attacked on my morning walk or being buried under the rubble of my house after a tornado or being shot at while sitting next to another car at a stop light or being diagnosed with a rare, incurable disease. I ran off these options as casually as one might go through a grocery list. And her eyes looked so burdened under her heavy brows that I suddenly felt awful for worrying her, so I said, “I know all of this sounds irrational.”
But I really didn’t believe that.
“You do know the likelihood of any of those things happening is very low,” she said, and I wanted to reply, “Until it isn’t.” But I didn’t.
Instead, I asked her what I could do to get over my fear: Do you have any tricks? Is there some sort of book I can read? Can you hypnotize me? Please say you can hypnotize me. It’d be great if you could just hypnotize me.
I wanted her answer to be definite and quick, not simply because she charged one-hundred dollars a session but also because, being in my late thirties, I found it embarrassing to be as scared as I was. But, to my disappointment, she said, “To understand your fear, we need to pinpoint when you first began to feel afraid.”
5. A woman’s heart beats slightly faster than a man’s heart.
The women in my family have always been afraid. As a child, I remember my grandmother cautioning my mother, my aunt, and myself on how to keep safe: You should never walk alone at night, but if you must, make sure you have a weapon. Never answer the door for someone you don’t know. It’s better to back your car into your garage so you can see if someone tries to get under the door before it closes.
My grandmother, who lived alone, kept a vacuum cleaner attachment on the top shelf of her closet in case she had to fight off an intruder. It was a heavy metal pole from an old, canister model, and she once showed me and mother how she planned to use it if anyone ever chased her into her bedroom.
“I’d wait for them to ‘round the corner and then…Bam! Bring this down right on their head,” and she swung the pole in slow motion so that it landed squarely on top of the imaginary intruder’s skull.
Sometimes my grandmother would answer the phone with her chin down and chest puffed up as she tried to fashion her voice into a deep baritone. “Hel-low!” she’d bellow, before recognizing the voice on the other end and reassuming her motherly, southern drawl.
“Sometimes I answer the phone like that so people think there’s a man in the house,” she told me.
She said she always felt safer when there was a man in the house, which made me pity her, a woman who, after two divorces and the death of her last husband, had lived without a man in the house most of her adult life.
6. Because the cells in the heart do not divide, heart cancer is extremely rare.
I’m not one of those people who thinks It could never happen to me.
I’m always waiting for It. On dark streets, I imagine It coming toward me as I ready my thumb over the trigger of my pepper spray. I think about It at night as I lie in bed, stretching my arm out toward the nightstand to feel around and see if my knife is still there. I pray, hunched over in my middle seat, before takeoff and after landing because I know It doesn’t care that more people die in car accidents every year than in plane crashes. I ready myself for news of It after every mammogram. I look out the window at night and expect It to be staring back at me.
“What’s your worst fear?” I asked my son when he was about 5 years old.
“Dying,” he said. “What’s yours?”
I, too, probably should’ve said dying. Dying is vague and unimaginable to a child. It’s something that happens to crudely drawn cartoon characters after falling off a cliff and before they find themselves miraculously revived and unscathed. Instead, I told the truth: “My number one fear used to be being killed by a serial killer, and my number two fear was being killed in a tornado, but that’s changed,” I said. “Now my number one fear is something bad happening to you.”
7. Congenital heart disease can be passed down from one generation to the next.
I want my son to be ready in case of an emergency, so I quiz him regularly: What should you do if you find me on the floor and you can’t wake me up? What are the best places to hide if someone breaks into the house? How do you get out in case of a fire?
When he was about four years old, we were talking in bed and I said to him, “Show me how you would escape if someone held you down like this.” And I pushed my son back on the bed, grabbed his arms, and held him firm against the mattress. I wasn’t pressing down on him with my full weight; it was just enough to make moving difficult for him, and for a couple seconds he struggled against me, as I hoped he would. I wanted him to get angry, to pry himself free from my grip with force and determination. I wanted him to reassure me that if he were ever in that position that he could escape, survive, fight for his life. Instead, he stopped struggling and started to cry.
“You’re scaring me,” he said, and I let go and looked at him, my tiny, sweet boy.
“Why are you scared?” I said. “It’s just me.”
8. A heart is about the size of two hands clasped together, as if in prayer.
Not too long ago, I woke up in a panic. I wasn’t exactly sure why, so I stared up at the ceiling and allowed my mind to wander from frightening scenario to frightening scenario until my belly was swollen with dread. Maybe someone was in the house, maybe the wiring in the walls was bad and cause a fire, maybe one of those small biplanes that were always flying low over our house was about to crash into the roof just above my son’s room. I didn’t know which of these things was about to happen, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that one of them would. In a matter of minutes.
I didn’t have much time.
So I went to my son’s room, pulled back his covers, squatted down low and braced myself as I heaved his seventy pound body into my arms and carried him back to my bed. After I had him safely tucked in, I eased in next to my boy and gently stroked his head.
“You’re okay. Mommy won’t let anything bad happen to you,” I whispered into his sleeping ear, as I calmly waited for a crash.
-Shavahn Dorris-Jefferson
Shavahn Dorris-Jefferson’s work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Rattle, Painted Bride Quarterly, Carve Magazine, Salamander, The Baltimore Review, Río Grande Review, and Sugar House Review, among others. She was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize and has been named a Crossfield Fellow by Cuttyhunk Island Writers Residency. She is the associate poetry editor for The Maine Review.