Behind the Scenes Minis: Hearts and Arts

us to not record this time. Yeah, it's been a kind of an ordeal this particular week. I'm going a prefaces by saying I'm not asking for medical advice. Please do not send medical advice if you find yourself writing an email that starts I know you said not to send medical advice, but please don't send that either. But I'm going to tell the story of the two times that I got an electric cardiogram. So the first time, this was more than twenty years ago, I was having

a palpitation issue. I worked at a place where we had a nurse, and so first I went to the nurse and told her what I was experiencing, and the nurse said that I should go to urgent care, which I did, and they hooked me up to the machine and that was normal. Then they were like, Okay, we're going to just put you on this monitor for a while. Just chill out in this room and we'll be back to check on you in a little bit, and I

said cool. While they were gone, I started to really need to pee and it was one of those things where I couldn't stop thinking about it, and the like need to go to the bathroom was stressing me out. And then that was making the monitor like that was making my heart rate go up, which I was also aware of because I could see and hear the monitor and it was a cycle. And finally the nurse came back in. It was like whoa, what is going on?

And I was like, I've got to be so bad anyway, the urgent care at that time also this becomes a story about how our medical system in the United States has broken. This is pre Affordable Care Act that we're talking about. Is how long ago this was still broken. They wanted to give me an event monitor, which is kind of like a Halter monitor, but instead of continually recording my heart I was supposed to mash a button when I was experiencing the palpitation feeling that I was having.

Because nothing had other than the fact that when I urgently needed to use the bathroom, my heart rate was very high. Nothing had seemed unusual at urgent Care, so they give me this thing. I at this point was working as a massage therapist in a very fancy spa and the monitor was under my clothing. It wasn't visible

to people. But the first time that I needed to activate it, I was in the elevator at work, sort of behind the scenes, and I learned that it made an audible noise that I would compare to the sound of a dial up modem connecting. Gotcha, And I was like, I can't wear this at work. I am a massage therapist. Like, if I'm in a room with a client and I

mashed this thing, it's going to do this. And if I just don't mash it, because it's going to make this loud noise in the middle of somebody's massage, like, then I'm not getting the thing, Like I'm not getting the monitoring that I'm supposed to be getting, so I called the urgent Care and they were like, just send it back. Months pass and I get a bill for six hundred dollars, which is a tiny amount of money

compared to a lot of today's medical medical bills. But it was six hundred dollars that I did not have because the provider for the event monitor was out of network, and because for some reason I didn't get a bill for this until months after it had like the service had happened. I was passed the deadline to to like file like to get them to get the insurance company to like revisit their denial of the claim right, and I was like, I don't I don't have six hundred dollars.

Nobody talked to me about this costing six hundred dollars. Nobody talked to me about the fact that the provider for this thing was out of network. Apparently no one thought to see if they were in my network before signing me up for a six hundred dollar thing. That they didn't the signing me up for a six hundred dollar thing without like talking to me about it. And then I moved away and that was the end of that.

And decades have passed without me ever again hearing about that six hundred dollars, like it never went to collections or anything like that. It's just a whole it's a whole weird thing that is weird. That was all probably stress related. I don't know's it's the problem stopped happening. Hooray. That time I did have irritation from the adhesive on the the electrons. This time, we have talked about how I have been, like, I have hypertension, I'm on medication

for my blood pressure. I needed to have my dosage adjusted and I had gone for a follow up for that and my doctor was like, why is your heart rate a little high? And I said I don't know, and I had been putting in my pulse along with my blood pressure readings, and she was like, it's been a little high pretty much this whole time. Let's get

let's get an EKG. I at my physical I had already gotten all of the of the various blood work for things that might cause a person to have an elevated heart rate, and all of that had been normal, and the the EKG was almost was like also normal. And when I was asked, have you ever had one of these before? I was like, oh, yeah, it was probably more than twenty years ago at this point. She was like, yeah, this is it. It's changed almost none since then, but the machine will probably take less time.

And for my specific experience, the adhesive electrodes did not cause me any irritation whatsoever, which I was glad about because I do tend to react to adhesives. Sometimes I do too in medical contexts. So it was a great move for me to drop the very unwieldy topic for this because I was like, I bet I can do an electro cardiogram episode way faster than I can finish this unwieldy thing. That turned out to be totally correct.

Even working through having a cold the whole time. I did not feel ill enough during the work week to need to take sick days. My voice sounded terrible. I returned to the unwieldy topic, which is coming. I definitely would not have finished it on time. I continued trying to work on it. It turned out to be kind of a tangle. It is coming, though I'm not gonna

spoil what it is. It's gonna be soon. There. One of the papers that I read while researching this was about automated ECG interpretation, and it was called Automated ECG Interpretation, A brief History from high Expectations to deepest Networks in

the journal Hearts And here's a quote quote. The purpose of this article is to review the development of automated ECG processing from its beginnings to the present day, with the hope that between the time the article was written and published there will not have been some world shattering development to make the content of this paper outdated. I mean, I found that hilarious, the refrain of all scientists everywhere

right now. Yep. We have occasionally recorded an episode on something on the podcast and then in less than twenty four hours there's a major discovery of that related to that, something that seems more likely to happen in a field

like automated ECG interpretation. I also noted we've had a number of medical episodes lately, and they've been pretty focused on Europe and North America, and I think some of that has to do with like where the centers of academic and medical research were, But then some of it is also probably just information availability. It's totally possible that there were other discoveries elsewhere in the world. That I just did not uncover in what I was working on.

So I wanted to and not acknowledge that this topic reminded me of a thing that I forgot. Okay, which is it. I don't think I had ever had an EKG until last year, which is I've talked about it on the show. I'm fine, everything's fine. But I had been having weird chest pain. Oh yeah, And I had done a like is this heart burn? Because I almost feel like a jerk for saying this. I had never

experienced heart burn in my life. I can eat all of the cruel and evil things and the most I will do is burp, but I don't get a burning sensation like I don't. So I did not know. And I did a telehealth consult because it was like the middle of the night, and the doctor that I talked to was like, Hey, you're in your fifties. This could be a heart attack. Maybe you go to the er now.

And I went to the er and I didn't even have like this information all the way out of my mouth before like an orderly came screeching around the corner with the cart and was like, I'm still filling out paperwork and they did it and they're like, hey, your heart's fine, your heart's actually great, and I was like, okay, good. I thought I would go home, but that was when I had my gallbladder out. But the other thing that I had quite forgotten was that I'm presuming it was

some form of a halter EKG. When I was admitted and I was in the hospital, they continued to monitor my heart just for safety, and so I had one that lived or I had, you know, electrodes that lived on me. And I didn't know until later when I was like, what the heck's going on that it was sending all of my info continuously via Wi Fi to the nurses station. Oh yeah, until I like scratched myself in my sleep and undid one of the electrodes, which

to them looked like I was crashing. And right right there were a lot of very concerned people in my room, and I'm like, what what's happening? Yeah, wonderful of them to be on the spot, but yeah, I was just a dang dong that moved my gown around and scratched it myself in a way that yeah, ruined their feedback. I don't fully know what happened because you are typically

not conscious during a colonoscopy unless you're me. I wake him every time when I had been taken to the recovery room after I got a colonoscopy, and I was, you know, I had been brought my clothing and I was in kind of like, you know, a private area where I would recombobulate myself. They were unhooking me from things, and then somebody went, oh, that explains it. And similarly, like a monitor wire had had come off of what

it was supposed to be attached to. So I'm like, what was happening in the room while my thing was going on? Was somebody like, I don't know, something seems wrong, but she seems fine. Whatever it was was a dislodged monitor. You also gave me an unwieldy things memory. Oh yeah, of a recent event. Okay, so some time ago, perhaps a year and a half, huh, I was working on a subject which became unwieldy. Yeah, and I kind of

abandoned it and then I forgot all about it. And recently it has come to my attention that my sewing room must be reorganized. It's really like in a rough shape. If somebody looked at it. They wouldn't trust me to make a bed, let alone make a garment like it. It's become such a mess. And so I started like basically pulling everything out of there, running stuff to our storage unit, and then we're gonna put in new shelving

and like rebuild it out. But while I was doing that, I uncovered several books that had become buried under fabric that I had been using to research this other subject. I was like, huh, I wonder how far along I am on that. Maybe I should pick that b Yeah, yeah, so it might still happen. We'll see, Yeah, I don't know. My wieldy topic is definitely happening. It is I would say seventy percent written at this point. Once I got

all of my note taking done. It was not like the writing process has gone really quickly on it, but like there was just too much left to do for it to have been done in that amount of time. So my one last thing that I have written on my list of notes that I made for myself about the behind the scenes for this. I don't know how I wound up on the villain Eintoven Wikipedia page, because like we don't that's not that's not where I'm researching episodes.

So I think I might have like clicked on somebody else's source link on their thing and it turned out to be Wikipedia or whatever. But there is a Jack the Ripper section on the villain Wanchoven Wikipedia page alleging that he was a suspect for being Jack the Ripper.

I was shocked by this because until reading that paragraph, I had thought about what a nice guy he seemed to be, Like, he seemed to be very focused on giving other people credit for their work, even though that you know, like he didn't necessarily need to credit someone who did work independently of him, where they came to

a similar conclusion, but he did. I have no idea what he was like as a person, but the fact that he wanted to split his nobel money with an earlier assistant also a thing that I that just sort of was like, this seems like he might have been a nice guy. And then I get to somehow on the Wikipedia page and there's this Jack the Ripper thing.

So then I started trying to like find out what people saying, we're saying about him possibly being Jack the Ripper, and I didn't find any other reference to it in any places that have stuff about potential Jack the Ripper's aspects. I have deories you do. Yeah, okay, because maybe dabbling more Jack the Ripper reading than you. But yeah, well, and I am by no means a Jack the Ripper expert in either, but I do love that story. Yeah, it's a whole world of research that I have not

touched in any way. But I will say there are two things that are like, oh, I see how he got on the list, uh huh. One is that almost any doctor practicing at the time got on the list at some point. The other is that he was a foreigner, sure, and a doctor and that Okay, that's like the double trouble of well, you have an accent, you clearly must hate women and be weird. So I think that's probably all it was. Or maybe he was a super creeper.

I don't know, but uh, those are That pattern plays out a lot if you look at at a lot of the medical professionals in the area. It was like the crosshatching of like doctors check doctors who are foreign born check check check check check. Like it automatically and exponentially increased their their their suspect level for the authorities. Yeah, it was one of those things where I was like,

where did this information come from? And it's got that tag on Wikipedia of citation needed, and that I wasn't able to like reverse engineer any sort of citation for it. So anyway, I think that's all I've really got to say about electric cardiograms and today's behind scenes. I'll say hooray for them. Yeah, older than I realized they were. I mean I knew how that they are critical to cardiac care. I don't think I had a sense of just how many different things can be detected in one

until really working on this. We talked about Albert Beerstott this week. Indeed, I almost said this weekend. I mean I did talk about him in the preceding weekend with friends and my husband, but that's not the same. His work is so staggeringly beautiful that the almost clinical way

he approached it boggles my mind. Yeah. Occasionally when we talk about somebody having talent, like I will hear objections to the idea of talents as a thing, and it's like, there are definitely people who find some things that come very easily to them. Yes, And so when it comes to things like artistic talent. There are for sure people who find the process of making art and learning how to do it comes easy to them, and also people who like really have to work at it, and it

feels like more of a struggle. And I don't know how he personally felt about the process of learning to make art, but it does seem clear from like the episode as he wrote it, that it was something that he intentionally worked toward, not something that he necessarily just felt an aptitude for from the beginning. No, and I couldn't find the accounts. But in that lecture that we

mentioned that was given by Karen Quinn, I couldn't. I couldn't find her source for it, but she mentioned that accounts by his family are like, yeah, he wasn't actually very good at all, like growing up, we don't know how this happened. I mean, they know that he studied, but it wasn't like he was like a thunder kind that was like, oh, yeah, this child will become a great painter. He will become one of the best known

painters of our lives. Yeah. Yeah, I remember being in you know, art class in elementary school and the like, there was one kid who could just sketch these amazing lifelike sketches of people, while the entire rest of the class was like one step up from finger painting. I felt like that that was the case with him. No, not at all. I will say though, his family did

seem to have an interest in visual media. And I say that because we mentioned in the episode that he was a pretty quick adopter of photography as a reference collection tool, right, and his brothers also did a lot

of photography. One of his brothers became a professional photographer, and I found in one thing that I looked at and mentioned that he had actually opened a photography studio with his brothers that was quite successful, But I couldn't ever find verification of that, so I didn't include it in the episode. It may be that he financially backed them and he wasn't really involved in that business at all.

But one of his brothers did have a lot of photography credits and helped him capture imagery sometimes when they traveled together, and I think his other brother also did some So I mean, again, I don't know much about that brother and whether or not he was like I love photography, it's my passion, or if he was like

photographs seemed lucrative. I really really yeah, And I thought that quote that we included towards the end, that was written shortly before he died was really germane in all of this, because it's that line skill prevails over imagination in the Dusseldorf artists. They I mean, these are skillfully

executed paintings. They are absolutely beautiful, in my opinion the way I understand why our listener El who wrote in was completely captivated by it, because the dramatic effect of lighting in particular is just it will it will stop

you in your tracks. It's so beautiful, and it gets into a bigger discussion of the creator versus the audience, and like what the truly important part of that equation is, Right, It doesn't matter matter that he wasn't necessarily like I'm stricken with pain at the beauty of this, I must paint it, and was instead like, stamp a picture of that, Stamp a picture that I'm gonna pay this to my studio later. It doesn't matter to me that that was how that played out, because what matters to me is

that a person was emotionally moved by it later. Right, Yeah, So that's a whole big discussion of art. There are a lot of interesting discussions going on in the art world right now about the meaning of the finances of art and like how art becomes treasured to a degree that the average person cannot possess art, and like what it means to actually like the inflation of art value and what art value means, which gets very heavy and interesting.

There lots of interesting discussions you can find about it. But I mean, my thing has always been I don't care if this person was doing this for any particular reason. I don't care if they were moved. I'm sure moved

by it. Like, Yeah, I mostly see this kind of discourse in the in the context of writing rather than visual art, just because of the kinds of folks that I tend to to follow, And I would say I am familiar with the ongoing work of way more current writers than current visual artists, and I will often see discussions of the fact that, like the way we talk about writing and the way we talk about creativity, a lot of times people put this almost supernatural spin on

it when like, it's it's work. Yeah, it's work, and people should be paid for their work and the like mythologizing of the whole creative process does a disservice to

writing and other creative work from multiple angles. Yeah, I mean in the art world, this is a big part of that discussion, right, Like an artist is a professional maker of art, and they should be paid for their time and their effort and the time and effort that they spent you know, getting educated or practicing or whatever to get to the point that they can make something that you find of value enough that you want to have it in your home or in your life or whatever.

This gets me on another soapbox, but like it's that juxtaposed against this person painted a piece of art, and in a lot of cases, like in modern arts, sometimes people will be like, I don't see the technique in this, and yet it commands high for low five price tag, you know, five digit price tag, and people not understanding why that would be. And it is like a bigger discussion too about economic demand and markets and what people are actually paying for. Is it really the art or

is it the status of owning the art? Like it's so heady and it's such a long and big thing. But my other thing is this, if you like art and we are also in a world where on the upside, artists and access to art has become a little more democratized in some ways. Right. You can find a lot of people online selling their art that make absolutely beautiful

and incredible pieces of work. But often because I do have a lot of friends that are artists, it is shocking and mortifying to me how many people will try to haggle an artists down from their asking price. And it's like, because people think you made this, you could make more, why do you want so much money? You can just make another one. And it's like, no, because I spent time making this one, right, that is what you're paying for. Yeah, I also spent the time like

learning and practicing and honing my craft, in honing my art. Yeah, that's wild to me. We believe in paying artists in this household. I feel strongly about this issue. Yeah. That's on my trip to Asheville from a few weeks ago. At this point, they were having a festival in the River Arts District, which was one of the places that was devastated by Helene, with some of the with a lot of galleries and studios just absolutely destroyed. Yeah, and it like if you look at the map of the

River Arts District before Helene. It is maybe three times as big as the map of what was open when I was there. And I literally just walked around buying small pieces of art from people. Anything I saw that I liked that, I thought, Okay, I can get this

in my luggage going home. I just bought it. And I don't know, I don't remember what the point was of this besides the fact that, like, I loved seeing how many people there were who were out there selling their art and how different some of it was from each other. Yeah, and I love that, and I love that, you know, there is a place that, you know, all of these various artists like created a place that was a home for this that they are now recreating in

the aftermath of the hurricane. Yeah. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm such a believer in patronizing artists as much as you can. I think I've said before that my tattoo artist owns an art gallery, and it's a portion of the gallery space is what's set aside for tattoos, and so it is the dangerous equation of me sitting there for several hours at a time looking at beautiful art and not coming home having purchased. Yeah, there are so many times and I'm like, Brian, there's painting in the car, right,

It's okay, and I love it. There's so much that That is where I had my birthday this year. I had a bunch of friends and we went to the gallery and they closed the gallery for us, and they designed flash just for us, and we all got tattoos and looked at art. And several of my friends were like, oh, I see why this is in fact a problem, right, right, She's just wonderful. More people patronize artists, take care, take

care of the artists. There are lots of people that need patronizing, not in the negative, obejorative sense of that word, but in terms of like supporting them in their their careers. Artists are but one, but they're one that is very special to me. So if this is your weekend coming up, you can either buy some art from a local artist, or you can go to a museum and appreciate art

that way that also supports the arts. If you don't have time off, I hope you get to look at something pretty that makes your heart feel good and happy and whole, or evoke something in you that is important and meaningful to you. I hope everybody's nice to each other, and that we find ways to appreciate each other and art and the joyous things in the world as much as we can. I know that's hard sometimes, but it's

really important. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.