The first time my heart stopped, I was asleep. The pain hit me—a searing, agonizing inferno burning through my chest. (“Defibrillation is like a kick in the chest from a horse,” they said. They were idiots.) Tears streamed, everything burned. I gasped; a length of metal and a battery stood between whether I lived or died? In the aftermath, time felt suspended, those minutes a lifetime where I existed, alone with my pain, alone with the knowledge that I had somehow cheated death. But I’m never really alone, am I? The fear of sudden cardiac death is my ever-present companion.
April McCloud is a 1 percent bionic human, a librarian, and a black belt who worships her cat and hopes to be reincarnated as a red panda. www.aprilmccloud.com