A little over a year ago, a man put a needle in my hand, sent me off to sleep, and changed the landscape of my heart.

Apparently, it was an electrical problem, but it felt more like a bird rapidly beating its wings inside my chest, terrified and desperate to get out. My heart was broken. It had been broken for years.

In a hospital in California, I was told I couldn’t be fixed, patted on the shoulder and sent off with bottles of pills to quell the unruly rhythms I had most likely inherited from my father. The pills worked for years, but I lived in constant fear of waking to the desperate flutterings of the bird. Eventually, the bird began to appear more often, more aggressively, its terror increasing along with my own.

At times, the bird grew exhausted and the beating of its wings slowed, so slow my heart felt heavy, rooms spun and faded. I found myself in a hospital in Ireland, trying to escape in the middle of the night, talking to a psych doctor who convinced me to stay, told me the heart doctor was coming, that he was worth the wait.

I waited five days, the bird with me the whole time. When he came, this doctor who held hope in his hands like the sun, he told me those other doctors, the ones across an ocean as wide as a planet, were wrong. He told me he could fix me, that hope was something to be shared.

The rhythm in my heart has been steady for over year, and the bird now perches on the tip of my tongue, free to fly and sing, hope stretched across its wings.