The heart of our author sometimes races. So she learned to live with it

For the first time it happened on a trip. I remember that I drove ahead. My red bike was new, my friend Lulu was sitting on the luggage rack. The Elbe flowed to the right of us, it went slightly uphill, and everything at that moment was precious: my mother’s presence, in which I did not live as a separation child and who was now walking behind us with her boyfriend. Lulu, my joy about the new bike. I was strangely able to get around my heart, it stumbled, and then it struck like never before. It raced. When I think back on it, I see myself lying on a nearby bank, a five -year -old with a trembling chest. The others stood around me. A jogger stopped, asked what was going on, and soon afterwards I hung over the backrest of the bank. It stopped again as abruptly as the heartbreak had started. What has remained the knowledge that it can come back at any time.

Since then on the Elbe my heart and I have been in a relationship. In the course of my life, it fluttered countless times in situations in which I was emotionally churned and sometimes physically exerted. In which I was in love, anxious, overwhelmed. It still flutters and is not about working that I work. If you don’t tell them, my frenzied heart calls, I tell you! And then I lie down in carpet -controllers, in tiled corridors, between sitting in the train or in the forest and wait for it to click in again. In the best case, it is quiet so that I can not care. Rast and clink, my body verbs for almost 40 years. Nothing in this world brakes me as vehemently as my heart. Every time it reminds me that everything else is less important than I think. Every time I displace the knowledge as soon as it has calmed down and I don’t let me examine again.

It may be that the rhythm disorders sharpen my attention, but we all have a relationship with our hearts – unlike our kidneys. It is a miraculous organ. It sits slightly inclined in the left side of the chest, protected by the sternum, the ribs, lung wings and the diaphragm. A doctor wrote that it is similar to a mango, and I can do something with it. Its nature is artistic, also complex. It works largely autonomously: its own control center has it, the sinus node, which makes it beat about a hundred thousand times a day. In 24 hours it pumps around 7000 liters through the body, lifelong. I thought that it would certainly be several kilos of kilos for a long time. It is as light as the amount of sugar that I in my chocolate tart Schütte, barely 300 grams.

Stop beating, we die. Therefore, it scares us when the heart races or stumbles when it exposes or hurts. Our concern is not exaggerated, because although we can rely on excellent medical care, cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death in this country. More than 358,000 people died of them last year. It is hardly surprising that the most prescribed medicines are cardiovascular medication. And we also seem to strain our heart more than the people in many other countries. In any case, in Western European comparison we have a lower average life expectancy than you.