In court, however, his attorney had emphasized only the line saying I had been discharged in stable condition. He had used that sentence to make it sound as though the doctors had already proved I was fine. Nobody had read the recommendation for cardiac monitoring, and nobody had mentioned that a physical cause was still being investigated. The truth had not been completely erased—it had simply been trimmed until it told the story Daniel wanted.
That night the monitor beside my hospital bed sounded an alarm while I was asleep. There was no argument, no courtroom, no audience, and nobody for me to manipulate. My heart rate had dropped into the thirties again while I was doing nothing but sleeping. By morning, Dr. Shah had stopped saying I “might” need treatment.
“You need a pacemaker,” she told me. I asked her one last time whether panic or anxiety could have caused what they recorded, because some part of me still needed permission to believe my own body. She shook her head and said, “You cannot decide to create the conduction abnormality we captured.” Then she added, “Being frightened does not mean you imagined the reason you were frightened.”
