I am lying on a bed in a hospital gown, a Doppler ultrasound machine next to me, waiting to have a trans-thoracic echocardiogram with a bubble study. This test will reveal whether I have a hole in my heart--that patent foramen ovale that threads through the family lines.
“Have you had an IV before?” the nurse asks me.
“No. But I’ve given blood,” I reply.
“Oh, well this needle is about a third of the size. Don’t worry—I’ve done this a couple times before,” she jokes, as she sticks me.
“At the end of the echo, we’ll be injecting agitated saline into your IV, and then we’ll watch it move through your heart,” she tells me.
Jason, the echocardiographer, attaches cords to my chest. “This is a Doppler ultrasound,” he says, applying a jelly-like substance to my chest and placing a flat, rectangular object there.
Suddenly my heart is on the monitor. It is stunning. A big oblong ball of pulsing light surrounded by darkness. It is heaving and thrusting and appears to be divided in two.
“See this smaller side?” Jason asks. “This is your pulmonary side. It goes right to the lungs. All your veins feed back to this side. The other side is your systemic side.”
He starts capturing pictures of my heart on the machine.
“Did you know the aortic valve is the point of highest blood pressure in the body? Look, the mitral valve looks like a fish mouth! Do you want to see your lung? Take a deep breath.”
I inhale. My heart disappears. I exhale and my heart appears again. I can’t help laughing.
“Our heart valves are actually like one-way doors,” Jason says. “Two of the valves contract at once and the other two relax. So it’s not really a pump. If your heart was really a pump, you’d only live five years and your heart would have to be three times as big.”
“My Mom has a hole in her heart,” I tell him.
“Ah, patent foramen ovale,” he says. “It means ‘the Window’ in Latin. It’s there so we can breathe without our lungs when we’re still inside our mothers. That explains why you’re having the bubble study.”
The nurse injects the agitated saline into my IV.
Instantly I see the right side of my heart fill with bubbles.
“See all the bubbles in the pulmonary side?” the nurse asks me.
Jason is suddenly quiet for the first time. “Wait, let’s do it again,” he tells the nurse.
“Why?” I ask, watching the bubbles on the monitor.
“I don’t leave any room for doubt,” he says.
He takes a series of digital pictures on the monitor. The muffled sound of my beating heart comes out through the machine as he captures the sound files for the cardiologist to listen to.
“So when do I find out?” I ask him when it’s all over.
“Next week,” he says.
But I don’t have to wait. I saw the bubbles move. I know I have my mother’s heart.
