A scan I almost talked myself out of getting came back with a flag on it. Nothing I could feel, nothing I’d have known was there — just a number on a report that said look closer.
So they went to look closer. The follow-up test they wanted was booked two to three months out, which is its own quiet kind of cruelty when the thing in question is your heart, but I got lucky and slid into a cancellation. That test found the real problem. And then, while it was looking, it found a second one I hadn’t come in for.
Two things about my own heart that I did not know a week ago. I’m going to leave the specifics off this page — they’re mine, and they’re still being sorted — but I’ll tell you the honest part: my stress level right now is somewhere past anything I have a good word for. You don’t realize how much you take your own heartbeat for granted until a stranger hands you a reason to listen to it.
And then came the sentence that actually broke something in me.
“The soonest we can get you in is October.”
The third week of October. To see an actual cardiologist. Months of sitting with two new diagnoses and a rising tide of what if, doing nothing, waiting for a calendar to grudgingly make room for my heart.
I understand the system is overloaded. I understand I’m one of a great many people in a queue. I understand that, statistically, most of us in that queue are fine to wait.
But I want you to sit for a second with what it is to be told to wait until October when the organ in question is the one keeping you alive, and your nervous system has already decided this is an emergency whether the calendar agrees or not. “Not acceptable” doesn’t quite cover what I felt. It was closer to a full-body refusal.
So I did the only thing that’s ever worked for me when I’ve been told to stand still. I moved.
One email
Here’s the part that made the difference: I keep an apartment in Bangkok, so it isn’t quite the exotic medical-tourism story it might sound like — I’ve got a place to land and a hospital I already knew of. But I started this whole process from right here in the Midwest, at my kitchen table, with a scan report and a rising sense of panic. So I sent an email to the Heart Institute at Bangkok Hospital.
Monday morning. First thing. A preventive cardiologist, the exact kind of specialist I’d just been told I couldn’t see until the leaves were down.
It was that easy. One email, and the wall that had been quoted to me in months turned into a couple of days. I closed the laptop and, for the first time in a week, felt my shoulders come down from around my ears.
What I’m actually saying, and what I’m not
Let me be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of story that gets flattened into something it isn’t.
I am not a doctor, and I am not telling you what to do about your health. I’m not telling you the American system is broken and you should all get on planes, and I’m certainly not handing out medical advice about hearts — yours or mine. I’m telling you what I did, in my situation, with a place to stay abroad and enough miles on me to know how to use it.
Because that’s the piece worth sitting with. It wasn’t better doctors or better medicine that I found in Bangkok — American cardiology is world-class, and I’ll be leaning on it too. It was access. The single thing standing between me and a specialist was a calendar, and I happened to have somewhere else to go where that calendar had room. Most people don’t. That’s not a triumph on my part so much as an accident of how I’ve built my life, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.
And the honest footnote on the whole medical-travel idea: it is not a clean fix for everyone. Care split across two countries means records that don’t talk to each other, follow-ups that get complicated, continuity you have to stitch together yourself. Not every condition travels well, and not every fast appointment is the right one. It solved my immediate problem — getting eyes on my heart in days instead of months. It is not a prescription for anybody else’s.
What waiting really costs
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The medical danger of my two diagnoses is one thing, and the cardiologists will tell me soon enough how worried to actually be. But there’s a second danger nobody puts on a chart, and that’s what the waiting does to you.
Four months of dread is not a neutral holding pattern. It’s four months of a stress response your heart is now, ironically, less equipped to carry. Being told to sit and marinate in fear until October isn’t a delay in treatment — for the anxious among us, it’s a whole separate injury, layered on top of the first.
So I refused the marinating. Not because I’m brave — because I couldn’t stand it. I traded four months of standing still for two days of doing something, and whatever Monday’s cardiologist tells me, that trade already feels like the first full breath I’ve taken all week.
I’ve built this whole strange little travel life around one stubborn idea: that when you’re stuck, the way out is motion. I did not expect to be tested on it quite like this. But here I am, a plane ride and a phone call ahead of the wall they built in front of me — and if there’s anything I’d want you to take from my week, it isn’t about Thailand, or hospitals, or hearts.
It’s just that when someone tells you to stand still and wait, and everything in you is screaming that you can’t — you’re sometimes allowed to go find another door.
I’ll write about what the cardiologist actually says once I know. For now I’m just grateful to be moving.
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