Day 927: Greens

What are your associations with the color green?

Mine include:

• Plants and trees
• Healthy food
• Lack of experience
• New growth
• Envy
• Feeling sick
• A color I miss during the winters in Boston
• A color I don’t usually wear
• The trim color for the outside of my current home
• Money

Yesterday was the day of my first appointment with my very experienced and non-green chief cardiologist — Dr. Deeb Salem — since getting my new cardiac device in the green month of May. My doctors and I have been hoping that my greenly new pacemaker/defibrillator might provide new and healing therapy for my 62-year-old — and extremely unusual — red, blue and not-green  heart. While you might be green with envy about my having such a special heart, there have been many times in my life when I’ve been greenly sick, dealing with my heart condition since the green days of my birth.

When I woke up yesterday,  I was feeling a little green around the gills with nervousness, because I have continued to feel greenly depleted whenever I climb stairs.  My green fear was that might be a bad sign, especially since one of the green doctors I consulted with — during the non-green months of November 2014 through April 2015 — had said to me:

“Ann, the only important sign of whether you’re going into heart failure is how you feel when you’re climbing stairs.”

To distract my green thoughts until my appointment with Dr. Salem yesterday, I made the green decision to notice the color green, all around me:

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
That’s Nancy, who used to be the harpist playing soothing music for the big green Boston hospital where I work. I haven’t seen Nancy since soon after I sang a song about a green jungle with the greenly new harpist, Allie, at a work party held during the non-green winter months.  Nancy, who was wearing such a lovely color green yesterday, told me she is half green, with her Irish-Jewish roots. She also said she listened to Allie and my performance of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on YouTube and found it greenly new and delightful, which made me go pink with pleasure and pride.

That’s the hallway of Tufts Medical Center, where I’m on my way to see Dr. Salem. To the left of that red exit sign is the Mother/Infant Unit,  where I greenly gave birth and new life to my only child, Aaron,  seventeen years ago.

That’s another green painting, close to that same spot. Every time I notice it I wonder, greenly, who chose it for that corridor wall and why.

There’s the portion of the check-in station in Cardiology where people stamp their tickets for the validated and reduced rate, so they don’t have to pay as much green in the hospital parking lot.  At that point, I was  just a few green minutes away from seeing Dr. Salem.

It’s Dr. Salem! Dr. Salem, who was wearing no green at all yesterday, told me that how I feel on stairs is NOT the only measurement of how I’m doing.  He also used his non-green experience to state that even if I don’t feel better,  as long as my heart doesn’t  get greenly worse, I should stay around through many more green months and years. He also told me some stories about when he was a green medical student fresh out of only two years of undergraduate college, but he made me promise not to tell any of those tales  in today’s green blog post.

Any green questions or comments from my readers around that great, big, beautiful green-and-blue globe we all inhabit?

Here’s my pick for some green music, today:

You can find many performances of “Greensleeves” on YouTube, including that one.

Many fresh thanks to Dr. Salem, to Nancy (and other harpists who soothe our green souls), to my son Aaron, to our newer cat Harley (who sometimes looks to me like he’s turning anxiously green under his fur), to my downstairs neighbor Karen and her dog Faxy, to the green monster at Fenway Park, to all the other greens I saw yesterday, and — of course! — to you, for reading this green post, here and now.