Taking Care of Your Heart Isn’t Easy
Suppose you follow your doctor’s advice to the letter on optimally caring for your heart but disregard or minimize the same priority when nurturing the emotional function of your heart. Can the strength and purpose of it still hold up?
OH, THE HEART
February is designated as American Heart Month. I have a check-up with my cardiologist in a couple of weeks. It would have been a lot sooner, but considering I didn’t see any of my specialists or primary doctors since before the pandemic, I sadly was demoted to new patient status. Guess it’s good I haven’t had too many issues that can’t wait, or at least that’s the outcome I’m hoping for when I finally make it through their doors.
What part does love play in the strength of your heart? When it’s breaking, suffocating, or longing, do all your efforts to keep it strong and resilient come in second to the emotional toll?
I’ve previously written about my insanely decades-long eating disorder when health wasn’t the priority in any of my goals. Now, I am a couple of years into recovery mode with a fresh perspective, a healing undernourished brain and body, and a heart holding more than one function.
It’s draining to live each moment, even the happier ones, thinking,
“God, let me struggle, push myself, and sacrifice if I must reach this impossible goal until my heart starts to give out. Then, I knew I’d worked hard enough. Keep it beating or don’t, and I can finally be done.”
My brain has taken a longer road back than my body. Still, health has become a priority because I want to outlive the struggle and live fully with each heartbeat and rhythm.
FUNCTION
Back on track with my calendar filled with upcoming doctor appointments, it’s reassuring to have a self-advocated health plan. Symptoms deemed small or substantial, I’ve documented and tracked.
The only control I need is in the choices I make in my best efforts to live a very long life minimizing medical intervention unless deemed necessary for the quality of the years I have left.
My daily exercise welcomes my morning no longer for punishment but for everyday strength in aging and to hold my muscles, bones, and organs together, so I don’t become a human “Operation” game down the road. Challenging myself physically now has boundaries to reduce injury and minimize a lengthy recovery.
Nutrition is no longer a bad word that slid me down a rabbit hole. I do want to perform at my peak for my age, my medical past and present, weaknesses, and to maintain the most quality of living for 20–50 more years. I function better when I don’t need a dictionary to read the ingredients in my food; I enjoy the varied palate of flavors from nourishment grown from God’s creation on Earth, harvested products used in culinary edible design and entertainment, and consciously choose any day or time my manmade craving for manufactured treats attempting the divine. No reason to ever turn down rice Krispy treats.
EMOTION
Oh, that heart has the capacity to beat so full and robust it overflows, spilling its energy into friends, family, and those you feel your heart couldn’t survive missing.
What gives it a reason to hesitate, skip some beats, or give up and flatline when you’ve been working so hard? Why does it seem not to matter how physically conditioned you are, mentally attuned, emotionally balanced, and spiritually led? But, you still lose strength in all other areas of your body and life when the four chambers of your heart are torn apart with emotion?
Think back over your lifetime. Do you remember some of your first interactions where your heart overpowered everything else?
Do you remember your first crush? There was the excitement you felt merely thinking about that person, the quick flutters in your stomach, and your heart racing to meet the emotion head-on. It was as if you would need to vacuum-seal your heart in fear it burst wide open before admitting or proclaiming how you felt.
Did you ever experience a deep longing for someone who didn’t feel the same or waited too long and was no longer available? A loss that wasn’t known can still feel like something of value to mourn, and an empty opportunity to love can leave you amazingly hollow.
Did you innocently love but then have your heart emotionally strangled trying to keep up with being enough through power plays and manipulation in what your behavior in your first relationship should or should not be?
Did honest heartbreak take you down? When no failure is involved, but love has run its course, it still leaves you with pieces to pick up and rearrange to decide on building a different future.
TILL YOUR HEART BEATS NO MORE
How do you know that after all your focused attentive care for optimal heart health, physically and mentally connected, it will survive the emotional tragedy of heartbreak no matter what form it takes when it arrives? How do you know you’ll make it?
You don’t.
The miraculous organ, the heart, is your center. It pumps blood to all parts of your body. It reaches beyond the small space it takes up to give us oxygen and essential nutrients. It was probably elementary school when learning the basics was the most powerful foundation for wanting to understand human beings and our heart-driven passions for people and the need to express and share it.
We are not guaranteed to survive but to experience the sheer magnitude of vibrations so intensely it creates a new rhythm to your heart’s beat and provides healing rescue breaths is worth the risk with any love that preserves your life till your heart beats its last.
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