How to cope with psychological distress from heart disease

It sometimes seems like I have laid on the same bed in the same clinic off and on for 38 years, waiting for my pacemaker check. Usually the news is good, but the doctor has been tracking a stubborn ventricular arrhythmia and trying to medicate it. He says it originates from surgical scarring.

I joke with my friends that if I passed him on the street, he’d say: “Mr Schwindt, add another quarter tab of the beta blocker in the morning!”