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I lay down on the crinkly white paper on the exam table in Dr. Oster, a pediatric cardiologist’s exam room.  I was now thirteen years old and Dr. Kaye, my adolescent medicine doctor was really worried about me.   Apparently, my heart had been going into some abnormal heart rhythms. Dr. Oster wrapped a child-size cuff around my upper right arm and let the automatic machine inflate and deflate it.  My blood pressure was 96/52 and my heart rate was 122.

Usually when I was lying down it was around the 120s, so that was pretty typical for me.  Then when I sat up it would bounce up to around 135 or so.  When I stood up it would hit the 150s.

I knew nothing about abnormal heart rhythms.  Neither Dr. Kaye or Dr. Oster ever told me anything specific about something being wrong with my heart, but that day at Dr. Oster’s office, after he took my blood pressure and heart rate lying down, sitting up, and standing, I read it right off his face.  After he left the room for a moment I looked it up on my phone. A normal heart rate for a teenager is 60 to 100 beats per minute, and it shouldn’t fluctuate like that with changes of position.

When Dr. Oster returned he told me that my heart was beating in an abnormal heart rhythm called tachycardia and he would need to run some tests on me.  I was not surprised.

After I bombed at regular middle school, the partial hospitalization program was like a rescue jet to take me to safety. Originally I had gone to the local private Jewish Day School, but they had really small classes.  Plus all the other kids had been together since kindergarten.  I had just moved to Massachusetts so I didn’t fit into the giant clique that only left out one other girl who didn’t care because she always had her nose in a book and was oblivious to the world around her.

I had gone to most of the sixth grade but bailed toward the end of the year when I couldn’t take the bullying anymore. The partial hospitalization program probably would have been a good idea then.  Instead,  I went back for the beginning of seventh grade, but again, didn’t last long. My gastroparesis flared up which stressed out my parents, who, big surprise! Tried to blame it on psychological causes, even though I’d had extensive testing done at the hospital when I was ten showing that I have one of the most severe forms of gastroparesis possible.