how to be an american housewife by margaret dilloway

I wonder when I can use it in a story?” We are buzzards, writers. So this is how a doctor speaks when delivering news like this. But underneath that, my pragmatic writer’s brain rubbed its hands together gleefully. A mini-paramedic team accompanying you wherever you go.Īs I listened to him talk, I felt all the emotions expected in such a big-stressful-news situation: panic, worry, sorrow. The solution was a pacemaker and defibrillator. Too many of those and you can go into cardiac arrest and die. The monitor I’d worn, he told me, had revealed a run of ventricular tachycardia. As such, he’s more experienced and proactive. He has about a dozen patients with the disease. This new cardiologist conducts research into the condition, a relatively newly discovered thing. My old cardiologist had told me everything looked stable. Symptoms range from none at all, to heart failure. There is no cure, only management of symptoms.

Basically, the heart walls are supposed to be smooth, but for us they’re spongy, which can lead to the muscle flabbily and ineffectively pumping. It runs strong in my family both of my siblings have it, and my mother and two of her sisters died from it. I’d been going to see a different cardiologist for a genetic condition called noncompaction cardiomyopathy for the past five years. It was the kind of foreshadowing that reality shows use, displaying footage of too-cocky contests bragging about how they’ll win, only to be immediately booted.

Nice place, I thought, seeing the fountains and benches outside the brand-new facility. I should have known how it was going to turn out when I walked into the UCSD cardiology courtyard that day. Then, in June, I visited a new cardiologist.

Thus my days from spring on into summer were spent writing and obsessing about writing, and numbers and obsessing about numbers, and generally bemoaning all the writing things and fretting about what would happen next. I was also working under contract on the second book of Momotaro, my middle grade fantasy series, the first of which publishes this year. Last spring, I published my third women’s fiction novel. And then some invisible hand wrests away control. Sometimes everything we do seems to take on equal importance, like spotlights trained on every prop onstage when the lights should only be on the actors. Please welcome Margaret Dilloway as our newest WU contributor! Margaret is the author of three published novels (How to Be an American Housewife, The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns, Sisters of Heart and Snow ) and an upcoming middle grade fiction book (Momotaro Xander and the Lost Island of Monsters ), and can often be found giving helpful advice in WU’s Facebook group.

How to be an american housewife by margaret dilloway