dreamy!

Thursday, mar. 28, 2002   |   0 comments

This past week, I dreamt that a) I met a talking panther, and scratched his head. “This is what MY kitty likes,” I said. “That does something weird to my ass,” he said. And, b) That I went to get “Born to Kiss” tattooed on my neck, but they typoed “Born to Kill” instead and I was unable to get it fixed because I couldn’t figure out what font they’d used.

Possibly related: I gave up coffee! I started yoga! (I’m now one of those people you see walking down the street, all blissed out in comfortable clothing and slide-on shoes, carrying the ubiquitous rolled mat, who you just want to pinch, pinch, pinch!) I have soy milk in my refrigerator! And vegetables!

On deck: Menstruate with the moon, purchase a loom, hemp.

Also, I’ve been having trouble breathing.

It’s a weird feeling, not being able to breathe. For a while I thought that it was just that my new bra was too tight (or, less exciting, that it was straining against a surprise extra layer of back fat). I kept tugging at the reinforced fabric at the front, stretching it out and away from my chest to talk. Then I resorted to pulling the underwire up and over above my nipples and just leaving it there.

For days I walked around like that, my bra cooling on top of my rack, but even then, I couldn’t manage to catch a true, deep breath. On day four, my thoughts turned to a friend’s collapsed lung, how, before his big operation, he had thought it was just gas and kept pounding his chest, trying to burp, and when that didn’t work, standing on his head with hopes that the discomfort would bubble out his soft end.

I was tempted to call my doctor, but I felt that last year’s complaint (which dove-tailed so nicely with my father’s triple bipass) about how my heart was beat, beat, beat … BEATing, and the ensuing trip to the abrupt Russian EKG nurse — who said nothing but “Take your top off” (“Maybe that was her name,” a friend suggested later) then covered my back and chest with pads attached to little wires that lead back to a large machine, which looked an awful lot like that whirring, blocky computer on Wonder Woman, and printed out a strip of paper covered in rhythmic spikes that proved me to be perfectly normal — had maybe labeled me a wolf-cryer.

So I called and asked my friends for advice. Maybe it was allergies, Jill thought, though yes it did sound somewhat like asthma. “What if I took hit off your inhaler, just to see?” I wondered, “Or would that be too intimate?” Jay thought it might be stress, “but I feel fine,” I insisted, “totally relaxed!” My friend Liz, who’s one thousand months pregnant, agreed that it might be fluid in my lungs, but then talk turned to the contractions she’d been experiencing off and on all weekend, how the baby’s head was now to the side and well below her cervix, and the labor-inducing merits of nipple-stimulation, and somehow I never got a chance to mention my new idea that I was perhaps experiencing some sort of sympathetic Lamaze “breathing awareness.” I pitched the idea to my other friend Liz, and she said simply, “I think that you’re going to be really embarrassed that you didn’t call your doctor if it turns out you’re dying,” which had a certain, ringing truth to it.

I put a call in to the Pacific Medical Center and promptly dropped into a voicemail labyrinth. Once I finally got a beep, I answered with an airy message about hoping to get an appointment so someone could, maybe, tell me that I wasn’t dying, followed by lots of heavy breathing.

My favorite nurse practitioner called me soon thereafter and yelled at me for leavng such an alarming message so late on a Friday afternoon, but calmed down once we determined that “the pain in my leg” I had mentioned was the dull ache of a muscle pulled on the trotter at the gym and not the sharp agony of a blood clot. And she relaxed even further after I asked her whether this may have anything to do with my “heart problems.” “It’s probably acid reflux,” she said finally, “or a panic attack. If it gets any worse this weekend, I want you to go to the ER. But otherwise, get yourself a bottle of Pepcid and just try to relax.”

And it was funny, but the second I got off the phone, my breathing felt freer, like somehow each breath was a reminder of how good it is to be alive. In other good news, my jaw is now closing on its own, and this year it looks like I’ll be cutting my hair, rather than letting it fall off, like last time.