Skylar Bayer's dreams of a career in scientific scuba diving are put in jeopardy when her heart begins acting strangely.
Skylar Bayer is a PhD candidate studying the secret sex lives of scallops in the great state of Maine. Due to a mishap involving a fisherman, buckets of gonads, and an unlocked Chevy, she once lost all her research samples, but gained a segment on The Colbert Report. She has also appeared as a guest on MPBN's Maine Calling and manages the blog and podcast, Strictlyfishwrap. Skylar has produced and hosted shows for The Story Collider throughout Maine.
Transcript
I'm in my buddy Jeff's basement and it's covered with body glow paint and black lights and glitter. It's Halloween. There's even a disco ball in this room and there's also a dance cage made of PVC pipe and rope, because that's what oceanographic engineers do for fun.
I'm visiting my friends, my grad student friends at MIT, the engineers, because I had moved to Maine. I'd left MIT to basically pursue a career in scientific scuba diving. They thought I was crazy because instead of going to some place like the Caribbean, I went to Maine where water temperatures are like 40 degrees and your hands go numb. You can't see past your hand and sometimes you have to crawl along the bottom to stay in one place. But I thought it was a really great idea.
So I come back and visit. At some point in the middle of the night, there's like five really sweaty, glittery scientists that are quite young in the corner of the dance cage trying to put back together this corner that had fallen apart. There's absolutely no alcohol involved whatsoever in this.
I am one of those five people blindly grabbing at these PVC pipes and, suddenly, one just comes and slams me right in the bridge of my nose. I remember saying, I was like, “Oh, my God, it's so painful. I'm drunk and I can still feel how painful this is.” I put a frozen bag of peas on it, actually.
The next day, the reason why this is so important in my head is the next day I start to feel really sick. It wasn't like a hangover sick. It was like I had the flu. But it wasn't just the flu, it was like I had these like someone squeezing my heart randomly throughout the day or sticking a needle in it, these single heart arrhythmias.
It really freaked me out. And the reason it really freaked me out is because I had had heart surgery the day I was born 25 years prior. So I was like, “Oh, my God, this is the end. I got 25 years and that's it.”
I was so sick for weeks. I'd sleep like 12 hours a day. I thought I had Mono, Lyme disease. I asked doctors to check me for everything. I even, when I got pulled over by a cop for speeding, he gave me a sobriety test because I look like such crap.
So I call my cardiologist in Boston and I'm like, “Look, you need to test me for everything because something is wrong with me.”
So they agree even though they're like, “Single arrhythmias are just whatever. Ignore it.” I can't.
So I go down. They do this whole series of tests and the last test is this 24 hour recording of my heart. It's called a Holter monitor. It basically looks like a really skinny Walkman. I don't know if any of you guys remember those. Maybe. And with all these wires attached to it and sticky pads. It basically records my heart rate for 24 hours and then I keep a log of what I was doing.
So I go and I stay in my best friend's couch in Somerville, and then I drive back to Maine. Then I popped the recorder in the mail and it gets sent off to Boston.
A week later is Thanksgiving Eve, so I'm back in Massachusetts visiting my parents. We get a call from the doctor and she says, “You have to come in immediately. Your tape recorder showed that your heart went into 36 beats, a ventricular tachycardia while you were asleep the night of your recording.”
Ventricular tachycardia or VTAC is this really fast rhythm that your heart can randomly get into that leads to one kind of heart attack. So, basically, I almost died on my best friend's couch and I needed to come in immediately.
But it was Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the doctors were out till Monday, so I was chained to a bed by a heart monitor Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I kind of felt like a prisoner. I'd go and do push ups when no one was looking and had to be taken on walks around the yard.
My newly appointed electrophysiologist or EP doctor, Dr. Alexander said, “Well, you know, we don't really know why you're sick but it's bringing out this weird arrhythmia issue and we need to do an exploratory surgery to figure it out.”
“There's three potential options. One is that this is kind of a fluky thing and there's nothing systemic going on. Another option is that you have sort of a single short circuit in your heart. But, no worries. We can like oblate it out. Just sort of pss and it's gone.”
And then the third option was that maybe I had really bad wiring and a condition that they can't really fix. Sort of like bad wiring in an ancient house. You can't fix that shit.
So he's like, “Well, you know, just so you know, you might not be able to scuba dive anymore, but I'm actually pretty optimistic that's not the case.”
I was like, “Well, I'm more worried about whether or not I'm going to live the next few years, honestly. Because when you're 25, you don't really want to die.”
Monday comes and I'm really nervous, because the last time I had surgery was the day I was born. I don't really remember that.
So the anesthesia nurse says to me, she's like, “Don't worry. We're not giving you general anesthesia because we need to gauge your reactions, but you're not going to remember anything.” And she's like, “No one even remembers my name.”
I was like, “Oh, yeah? What's your name?”
She's like, “Mary Anne.”
I was thinking, I'm like, “Okay, she better be right.”
I feel really groggy, like kind of drunk. I get rolled into the operating room and I'm basically just waiting to pass out and wake up after the surgery. But I start to feel them shove a catheter up my thigh and the pressure of like flesh being moved around and things twiddling in my heart. I start weeping because, apparently, this drug I'm on makes me really weepy. I'm upset but I'm mostly just really angry at them.
And then I feel my heart turn into this hummingbird of doom going at 380 beats per minute and then, suddenly, I feel this explosion in my chest and I black out. I had been defibrillated because I was basically dying on the table.
I wake up and I'm still in surgery. I was pretty pissed off about that. I was like, “This shit should be over by now.”
I don't know how much longer goes on. Actually, at one point, the doctor said, “Skylar, does this feel funny?”
And I was like, “Just as funny as everything else has felt this past hour.”
And you'd think that if a doctor hears that, your patient probably doesn't have enough anesthesia, right? Like to manage a sarcastic response. So at the end of the surgery, they pull me up. I'm sitting up and they're like, “You don't remember anything, do you?”
I was thinking, I'm like, “Oh, my God, these guys, these poor bastards.”
So I sound kind of drunk, because some of the drugs are working. And I point each and I point to the doctor and I was like, “You,” I was like, “I wanted to tell you to fuck off.” I was like, “But I wanted to be polite and I thought that'd be very rude.”
And then I point to the technician. I was like, “And you, your tapping on the computer was so annoying.”
Then I turn my head around to Mary Anne all Exorcist like and I go, “Thanks, Mary Anne,” and she just gasps.
I had exacted my revenge even though I was so like I was so angry and upset. I wanted to know what the diagnosis was and I'm like coming off of drugs. It's just kind of this big whirlwind of emotions and drugs. I felt like a mother that had just given birth and was like, “Is it a boy? Is it a girl?” What was the diagnosis? What happened? What's wrong with me?
I don't know who tells me. I don't remember that, but I remember them saying, “You have the worst case scenario. You have bad wiring in your heart. We cannot fix it and you'll never be able to scuba dive again.”
I cried and I wept and I was so upset because I was going to be this useless person in my scuba diving lab. I work in a scuba diving lab.
But then I was like I was so upset because I realized that I had no control over my body and therefore my life and my career or anything in it. It really hit me that I just didn't have any control whatsoever.
And then what I didn't have control on either was that they were going to implant this thing called an internal cardiac defibrillator, which is right here with me today, or an ICD. They said that this was basically my safety net. They were going to insert it in me in case I had another bad episode like I did on my best friend's couch.
And so I'm nervous about the surgery for two reasons. One, the anesthesia, which did not go so well last time. So I was looking for a promise from them. The second reason being that I had never seen an ICD. You know, when you're getting something put in you, you want to see it, right? Like what are you putting inside me?
So I say to my surgeon Dr. Ma, I'm like, “Dr. Ma, I really want to see one of these.” I was like, “I got to see my IUD before they put that in. I better be able to see my ICD.”
And he was like, “Well, I don't want to compete with your IUD.”
After a couple of days I have to wait for the surgery, I still haven't seen one of these things. And I'm in the surgery prep room and the anesthesia nurse walks in. I'm like, “Oh, shit, not looking forward to this.”
But my mom next to me, she's like, “Oh, my God, your name is Sky,” and the woman says yes. And Sky had taken care of me 25 years prior when I was born. She'd gone back to school and now she's doing my anesthesia for my surgery.
Then Dr. Ma finally shows up minutes before surgery and he shows me this ICD, which kind of looks like one of those MP3 players before iPods became really familiar. They're kind of body contour, but you're not really sure what shape you'd call it. It's dark gray.
And I said, “Oh, okay. Does it come in different colors?”
And he's like, “Well, no. You wouldn't be able to see it.”
I was like, “Well, no, but at least I'd know I had the hot pink one, right?”
So the surgery goes well because I don't remember anything. So check off that list. But afterwards, I'm in a ton of pain. It felt like they had taken my left shoulder, my whole shoulder and arm and shoved it back in, even though this thing was just above my muscle wall on my chest.
So we sorted the drugs out, but every time I tried to fall asleep my heart would start racing. I don't know if you know what it feels like to have your emotions changed without your consent but it's directly linked to your heart rate. When you're anxious, your heart rate gets really high.
Apparently, when I fall asleep, my heart rate drops below 50 beats per minute. The ICD was left on factory settings, which it does not let your heart drop below 50 beats per minute.
So I have this whole team of doctors and they're like, “Okay, well, we'll adjust the pacing settings and we'll do all the settings right now.”
I start feeling my heart rate go up and down and all over the place and I'm pissed off again. I just decide I'm just going to leave the whole situation and just leave my body.
And my mom turns to me at one point and she goes, “Skylar,” and I say, “I hate everyone,” and then I just resume my Zen like state.
So Dr. Ma comes running in finally. He's like, “Just turn the whole damn thing off. Just turn it all off, turn it all off.”
Then he comes and sits by my bedside and I turn and I look at him. Then I think, I'm like, “What could be the funniest thing that I could say right now?” Because I'm like, “How can I make this so much better?”
And I said in my raspy post surgery voice, “Here I was going to propose to you but then you had to screw with the pacing of my heart.”
And my mom just looks at me. She's like, “Oh, she's fine.”
On one hand, I'm very grateful for these doctors, but on the other hand, I'm like, in summary, they diagnosed a condition, a heart condition that they cannot fix. They can't do anything about it. They don't know what causes it. They've started turning me into a Cylon. They don't even know what I was actually sick with. They never figured that out.
And then they added to this list of things that I can't do anymore, things that have been taken away from me in my life. And the damn thing has only gone off once since I've gotten it in five years.
And I was really bummed about this scuba diving thing but my committee member, Chris, told me that when he was in grad school, he was doing a lot of snorkeling work for his research. He said the most productive summer he ever had, he was ill and could not snorkel. And he said he put all that energy he would have put into snorkeling into being the lead scientist, into writing the data plans, making sure the experiments were carefully, carefully picking up messes where people were too tired to deal with it.
And so I decided that I could do that instead for my research projects which were all dive based. I could be that lead scientist. It was exactly while I was feeling so disappointed in myself and so angry with my life, it was exactly what I needed to hear to get through my PhD degree, where I am now.
And actually, too, my boyfriend and I have been reading the Tao of Pooh to each other lately. One of the things that the author says is an old Chinese saying that's, “One disease, long life. No disease, short life,” meaning that if you know your weaknesses, you can take care of yourself the right way. And you can even turn them into strengths later on. But if you think that there's nothing wrong with you, you're probably headed for disaster.
I like to think that now that I have this new weakness, I am maybe a bit stronger and maybe a bit wiser for it.
Thank you.