Broken Hearts and Grocery Carts

A disclaimer: This isn't meant to paint anyone in a bad light, it's just how I remember what happened.

Here's where we left off: I was diagnosed with lyme, ehrlichia, babesia and bartonella, and I had just started IV Rocephin in the early spring of 2006.

So, I hadn't been on IVs for more than, I would say, a month when I started to think that my boyfriend was cheating on me.  And looking back, I think he was just someone who couldn't handle this kind of stress in a relationship.  Let's face it, it's a lot to ask of a partner.  Now, before you start sending me angry feminist hate mail, I'm not saying it was okay.  All I'm saying is that some people have marriages and a dozen children and never have to go through this kind of trauma.  So relax.

Right, so around the same time I start getting twinges in my chest.  People with a lower pain threshold would probably call them sharp shooting pains, but they did just start out as twinges.  And when you have a plastic tube shoved up your arm and into your heart, what's a little twinging?  Then, at some point, even I had to admit that the twinges were shooting pains, and then that the shooting pains were the kind of pain that knocks the wind right out of you.  But that all progressed over a couple of weeks.

So picture this (unless you're related to me, in which case, please skip this paragraph):  My boyfriend has stayed the night at my house, and I wake up from a dream in which he was cheating on me.  And I turn over and I say, "Hey, you were cheating on me!"

Here's a list of things he doesn't say:
What are you talking about?
Why would I ever cheat on you?
Oh please, I love you too much for something like that!
Have you lost your mind?
I would never!
Alessandra!  How could you say that???

Here's what he did say:
Him: What?  Who told you that?
Me: No one.  It happened in my dream.
Him: Oh.  Why would you listen to a dream?
Me: I was just joking.
Him: Well that's stupid.

Uh-huh.  That week, somehow, I found out for sure that he was.  I don't remember how, and it doesn't even really matter, although I do remember thinking that I had suddenly been dropped into an episode of Maury Povich.  What happened though, was that it broke my heart.  And I don't mean figuratively.  I mean literally.  I felt it shatter, and I started having something like heart attacks.

I get this intense pressure and pain in my chest, and my face turns completely white, and I vomit because it hurts so much.  All in all, it's a pretty sight.  Me lying on the floor, puking my guts out, shaking and screaming.  The last time it happened, I ended up banging my head over and over against the back of the toilet, because it hurt so much.

As you can imagine, many trips to the cardiologist ensued.  As best they can figure, it is the perfect storm that causes them -- heart block coupled with pericarditis and costochondritis -- basically everything inside my chest is inflamed, and then any irritation at all (it can be moving a certain way, a sudden change in temperature, or my being alive) causes this sort of cramping.  It's like the world's biggest charlie horse, but in my chest.  Oh lyme disease, you are nothing if not full of hilarity.

And that is how, after I won my first National Specialty ever with the fabulous Miss Marge, I ended up on the floor of the hotel bathroom begging my mother to kill me.

Since they began, I've had over 30 of them.

Now, I feel like between this post, and my last post that I've been a total downer.  So, here's something that happened later that year.

One of my friends, Andrea, had picked me up so we could go grocery shopping together.  We drove in her car to our usual grocery store, and each got a grocery basket.  I left the produce section, and started wandering up and down the aisles getting the things on my list, when I noticed a woman following me.  So I started skipping aisles and then doubling back, and she just sped up, and stayed on my tail.  She kept creepy staring at me, and then following me.  It was really starting to freak me out, and just when I started to get really worried, she came flying up an aisle towards me.  I did what any reasonable person would do.  Screamed like a banshee.  I screamed like a girl getting killed in a horror film.  I screamed and screamed and screamed, and she wouldn't back away.  And even though she was really startled, she reached out, and touched my arm and said, "Alessandra, it's Andrea.  Remember?  We came here together."

I'm still banned from that Stop and Shop.