Can you feel your heart?

I can feel mine, I feel it everyday.  I have felt it, consciously felt it, since I was in the hospital in Austin when I had my pacemaker emplaned.  Every move I  make with my upper body I feel it.  Every meal I eat I wonder how the food I am consuming is effecting my blood, because that is what the heart pumps after all and if the blood is effected then so must the heart be.  I look at the food before I eat it and wonder:

"Will this kill me?"

I know it sounds melodramatic but hey, when you are living with CHF that sort of thing just comes to you unbidden.  OK, it helps if you are a drama king/queen but I think even the most circumspect and mundane amongst us have to think something like that, after all living with a bad heart is living with real life everyday.

REAL life, if I might quantify, is the life that history turns on.  It isn't a fantasy or a PHOTOSHOP image, it is real by its very definition.  it is life and death, it is that thing that effects not only us but those around us.  Those we love.  Those who count on us and who will be wounded with our passing.

I am trying not to be as morose about all this going forward.  Jeff's passing, the fact that he was 2 years younger than me and still died of what appears to be heart related complications, is a harsh taste of reality.  I have to color it though with the harsh realities about my friend, that he never met a vegetable he liked and that cheese was a part of everyday.  Yes he stopped drinking long ago, but he did not stop eating the wrong things which in the end can kill you just as dead as Jack Daniels.

When they scanned me last September the Doctor told me I did not have coronary artery disease, my veins were clear.  In that there is not an answer but there is hope.  I am learning that a compulsive personality and drink are a dragon you have to face everyday.  In AA they call it a sickness and call upon a "higher power" to help them in their fight with it.  That's why AA doesn't work for me.

I'm not an atheist, I think it is the height of arrogance to think that my little monkey brain can comprehend anything so large as to be able to create everything.  It is the height of pride to think that anything so large has time for the piddling day to day goings on of my little life.  I do believe in free will though, and that few things are as unstoppable as the human spirit.

So it's been four days since I had a drink, three days since I acknowledged my best friend has slipped his moorings and drifted away and it's time to get on with everything.

I know it's time because the sun is up and I can feel my heart.