And after rolling around in the back of a racing ambulance with the crew from Emergency! like Richard Mantooth and Julie London and now with Gabby Dawson and Silvie Brett from Chicago Fire as I helped perform emergency tracheotomies and do chest tube thingys and inflate lungs with soda straws, I never stopped to think about it.
And the many times I have been in the wilderness and had to amputate legs with a Swiss Army knife and cauterize the wounds with a glowing red Bowie knife I placed in the fires to sear the blood vessels, I just didn't realize it.
And the babies I have delivered as moms went into labor and we drove as fast as we could to the hospital, I just took things for granted.
After all of this time of listening to other people's hearts with the imaginary stethoscope I had around my neck as I sat glued to the TV set....I just now realized that I have never heard my own heart beat. Nope, not once.
I guess I didn't get the Doctors Kit for Christmas like other kids. Usually my toys were mechanical in nature. Things like erector sets or Lincoln logs that would be strewn around my room instead of things like the Human Body or the Human Head-Brain.
My heart has been with me even before I was born. It was the first thing months before while in the womb of what would become Tommy Kender. It started beating and it has never stopped once. And yet, I have never heard it's sound.
Let me do the math for you. I'll be 70 this year and let's say that on average the heart beats 80 times a minute and (I Googled it) there are 525,960 minutes in a year.......PEOPLE, THAT IS 2,945,376,000 times that my heart will have beat by the time my birthday rolls around!!! I don't even know what you call that number...I guess a gazillion...And yet, I HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY HEARD IT BEAT ONE TIME....Amazing, huh.
I have choked it with smoke, drowned it with booze, clogged it with fat and yet it continues. I go to bed and it beats and I wake up and it is still beating and I have never heard it. Yeah, I know some of you wisenheimers out there are sayin', "Tommy, that's because you don't really have a heart". Well, that may be. I guess it's like if there is no one around to hear a tree fall is there really a sound.
My heart has been BROKEN and RAISED UP and DUG DEEP INTO. It's been CROSSED and PROMISED. It's been OPENED and LISTENED TO at least with my mind. But I have never once heard it beat.
So, just maybe, I might stop at CVS today and buy a cheap stethoscope and see just what the heck it sounds like....then again maybe I might just keep that mystery alive.
I'm now thinking, what an incredible experience that when one's "time" comes, that as you were laying in bed with family around you, you could be listening to your heart beat and then, but not with the piercing noise of some machine warning that your heart had stopped....but simply your could hear your final beat and then the "sound of silence".
Anyway, I'll let you all know what I hear, if in fact I hear anything.
Just another one of those thoughts that wake me up in the middle of the night.
Adieu
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