Atrial fibrillation—affectionately (and somewhat accurately) known as “Afib”—is like when your heart decides to go full jazz improv but forgot to tell the rest of the band. Picture a jazz pianist suddenly slamming out random notes while the rest of the orchestra sits there, stunned, wondering, “What in the bebop hell is happening?” That’s your atria. Meanwhile, your ventricles are trying to play it cool like, “Oh, we’re just gonna wing it? Cool, cool. No plan, just vibes, right?”

For me, Afib feels less like jazz and more like Orville Redenbacher himself has set up shop in my chest, enthusiastically popping kernels of chaos. Not content with merely making popcorn, he’s joined forces with the cast of Dueling Banjos to really crank up the ante. So now, my chest is both a snack bar and a backwoods hoedown, and the popcorn/banjo combo has zero regard for my comfort. Every erratic “thump-thump-PING-kerchunk” is like someone aggressively double-kicking a drum pedal, but instead of being cool, it’s just… alarming.

And then there’s the advice to “distract yourself.” Distract myself? Distract myself from the soundtrack of a five-alarm fire being played by a rabid orchestra inside my own body? Sure, no problem. I tried crocheting, but counting stitches quickly became counting heartbeats, which then spiraled into losing my place entirely. I mean, do you know how hard it is to crochet when you’re basically beatboxing to your own rogue cardiovascular rhythm? My scarf turned into an unintentional avant-garde art piece: part yarn, part existential dread.

So here I sit, completely at the mercy of this chaotic little drummer boy in my chest, scribbling nonsense to pass the time. Writing this dribble is like therapy, but cheaper—and honestly, whoever reads it is just going to have to accept that it’s half-heartbeats, half-hilarity.

But hey, at least Afib won’t kill me… directly. It’s not the fibrillation; it’s the pure exhaustion of feeling every single chaotic beat and trying to act normal about it. I’m over here trying to sip tea like, “Oh no, I’m fine, I just have a literal bag of microwave popcorn exploding in my thoracic cavity.”

So, while I wait to be cardioverted—essentially a hard reboot for my glitching heart—I’ll keep trying to stay “calm” and “distracted.” But if anyone comes at me with another suggestion to “just relax,” they’d better be ready to dodge my flying crochet hook.