The Patient is 77-year-old Female.

Where? Do I know her? Did she just walk in the room?

Nope, this one isn’t a Mustang. And I’m not 62 anymore either.

I noticed, back in the fall, that I was having shortness of breath climbing stairs and that set me off making the rounds of specialists: Cardiologists, pulmonologists, neurologists., even an ENT or two.

Among the findings: A string of zigzagging lights before my eyes had been a mini-stroke; I have paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, which means that once in a while, for no apparent reason, my heart races; and then, last week, the news from the cardiologist that I had “moderate blockages — nothing too severe” in my heart.

This stuff is particularly terrifying because the medical reports, which often pop up in my patient portal before I’ve spoken with the doctor, are written in a language I do not understand. In the proximal LAD, there is a focal calcified plaque 20% stenosis. I rush to an NIH site to translate, but usually come to the same conclusion: In ten minutes, I’m going to keel over. Then I call my cousin Jeff, a Physician’s Assistant in Albany, to talk me down.

“Well, you know,” Jeff says, “You are over seventy. It’s normal to have some hardening of the arteries.”

“But I drive a Mustang,” I say.

Haha. You know how sometimes things pop out of your mouth and you want to pretend it’s a joke, but you know it’s not a joke? It’s this dumb shit you actually believe.

I have not been absent from Substack the last few months just because I am bringing out my first novel. (“The Satyr in Bungalow D”. Available for pre-order. I may be having health issues, but no way I miss an opportunity to plug my book.)

I’ve been away because I have been meeting with doctors, going over medical reports, which often begin with a bizarre sentence:

Patient is 77-year-old female…

Where? I think. Did she just walk into the room? Do I know her?

Seventy-seven-year-old female is not me. I am the person in the tight jeans and leather jacket who is deciding when to put a hot red convertible back on the road and trying to market my book. (Robert Klein: “Beautifully written. Bawdy, funny, sentimental and highly original.” Hilma Wolitzer: "Touching and funny, a wildly inventive romp of a novel.”)

I cannot get my head around the idea that it looks like I have heart disease— note the denial in the phrase looks like — and that there is an artery in my heart that is allegedly twenty percent blocked. That overnight, I have gone from Mustang Sally to Old.

A month ago, I was knocking around the Village, walking twenty blocks to meet a friend for pizza at John’s on Bleecker Street. Now I am on a drug called Propranolol which is supposed to lower your blood pressure, but which can, the first few weeks, make you dizzy and exhausted

It is making me so light-headed and tired that yesterday, dragging just a half dozen advance reader copies of my book to the post office in a wheelie cart, I have to turn back after two blocks. Then I go on the patient portal, because that’s how you get in touch with doctors these days, and send a message to my Robo-cardiologist. He is 70 percent machine, but I am hoping to humanize him.

“This isn’t the drug, this sounds more neurological, you should message your neurologist right now,” he says when he calls me back.

There’s a piece of information – “sounds more neurological” – that does not put your mind at ease.

Also, “You know what? If the drugs are bothering you, just stop.”

I message the neurologist, who calls me back immediately and says this does not sound neurological to him.

Then, feeling a little better, I portal the cardiologist again with a question I feel stupid for not asking the first time. I hate to message him twice in one day, it makes me feel like I am bothering the doctor. Then I hate myself for having that feeling. I am a stew: anxiety, light-headedness, self-loathing, terror. The neurologist must consider me his most neurotic patient. But I need an answer.

“You said I could go off the Propranolol,” I write, “but I thought you put me on it because I had tachycardia and heart blockage. Is there another drug we should be trying? And is it safe to simply stop?”

The cardiologist calls me back, a gesture that suggests the human/Robo ratio is improving.

“I feel we are becoming very close,” I say.

I mean this to be a joke, a concept the cardiologist does not appear to compute, but he is very nice. No, I am not his most anxious patient, he says. No, I am not bothering him.

“Stay on the drug,” he says.

The light-headedness abates. I decide I will take another shot at the post office. I do triage, taking the books down to four. Two will go to book editors at The New York Times and Newsday, who I know won’t even look at them. I will balance that by sending the other two to people I think will be genuinely happy to get one: A woman who runs an indy bookstore in a town in the Catskills so small its Main street looks like it’s been chopped in half and my agent.

This is an exercise in lunacy. I know nobody cares about a book the way the author cares. Even Percival Everett’s mother, when a new one came out, probably said, “No, haven’t looked at it yet, but I’ll get around to it. The aphids are horrible this year.”

But I’m into one of my, “Oh, yeah? We’ll see about that.” moods, I am not about to be defeated by a four-block walk to a post office. I tuck my fingertip pulse meter, a COVID memento, into my bag, grab the wheelie bag, and head down to 14^th Street.

My book weighs 13.5 oz so I know exactly how much I’m hauling: 3.3 pounds. Before I took this stupid blood pressure drug, I was dragging bags of groceries from Trader Joe’s in this cart. Now, I’m lightheaded with four paperbacks.

One block in — no, make that half a block, in front of the flower shop — I stop to check my pulse. I started at 74, now it’s 82. If it hits 90, I tell myself, I’ll go back. I have been walking this neighborhood since I came to NYU sixty years ago. Fifth Avenue is my front yard. I can pick a block and tell you who I made out with, going back to my place. Now, every block, I have to stop and rest. It feels like a nightmare, like I have been lobbed into a world of old, sick people. At 11th street, I spot a bench in a churchyard and sit down.

Patient is 77-year-old female…

I make it to the 10^th Street post office, lean against the counter and send off my books. Choke on it, Newsday, who didn’t have the courtesy to respond to a note. Then I head home. I take Sixth Avenue which goes in my direction so if I need to, I can get a cab. The bag is light now, but the world is still divided: The people moving briskly along, talking, enjoying the beginning of spring, not even thinking about walking; the old, infirm people, walking with great effort. Like me.