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“Whaaat?!” was my mom’s reaction to the ER doctor, as if he just told her she was pregnant at 62. On the other hand I don’t know why it was my first reaction to laugh when the freckled doctor, EKG in hand, told her she was having a heart attack. Perhaps it was shock. Or maybe disbelief. I was so certain we were coming in for mental illness under the guise of physical ailments that I never considered that she might actually be physically sick. I had even called ahead to warn the ER of my mom’s mental illness.

I most likely laughed because I found myself unbelievably thankful that Catholic guilt steamrolls any logic in its path.

It’s common knowledge that a call from my mom after 10:00 p.m. is never a sign of mental stability. When I picked up at 11:30 p.m., I immediately regretted it. However, guilt for failing to return her call from the day prior overrode my sensibility.  Sure enough, she told me she was hyperventilating (she clearly was not) and that ‘they’ had broken in and stolen her medication information.  She wanted to go the ER because she thought her blood thinner was causing her shortness of breath and she wanted to learn about her medication. Hardly a reason to go to the emergency room. Hardly a reason for me to redress and drive out into the suburbs in the wee hours of a Saturday morning. But nothing I said convinced her otherwise, so very begrudgingly and fueled only by guilt I drove the 30 minutes to her house, swearing at mental illness every mile.

The surefire way to be seen by a doctor in the emergency room right away is to mention any symptom of a heart attack Or tell triage you’re getting married the next day. Either one seems to expedite the process.

As assumed, they took ‘I’m having shortness of breath’ pretty seriously down there B-Town. I grew up in this particular nondescript suburb and if more years than I care to admit hadn’t already passed, I would be able to name every non-Caucasian kid in my class of 700. Its not nearly as understanding of difference as the metropolis from which it feeds. It is fair to say that my experience with the mental health system over the past 25 years has jaded my expectations of the humanity shown to any person mankind has deemed crazy.  I was especially nervous for the level of compassion for someone with mental illness at a hospital without a psychiatric unit. Funny thing when your expectations are in the toilet you tend to be blow away by even the most basic of courtesies.  I was overwhelmed by the kindness shown to my mom by everyone. She wasn’t treated like a pariah or a child. They were kind and sincere. Not at all what I expected after I had already quietly outed her mental illness diagnosis to the attending nurse.

In the end it wasn’t a heart attack, although I don’t know that hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is any better. Especially since it’s buried deep within my mom’s DNA – and subsequently possibly ours – and is generally only discovered when the afflicted drops dead.  It cannot be cured and only added to the gang of hoodlum ailments cracking their knuckles in line to kill my mom.

My mom has always said, “I’m going to live until I’m 80. I come from good stock,” in response to whatever health issue I was was wailing about (usually smoking.) And time and time again, she survives. Ever the cynic regarding her health, she’s slowly making a believer of me.  And I will gladly eat that crow if she makes it another 17 years, 5 months, and 2 days.