In a heartbeat

I waited two months to hear back from my dream airline. They’d told me two weeks. With every week that passed I lost more and more hope. I thought it was pretty clear that I hadn’t been successful. But I didn’t mind. I was too busy starting my new career elsewhere.

Two weeks before I was due to start ground school with L and J I ventured into the city one afternoon to have my medical done. It’s a requirement that cabin crew be fit and healthy and with no pre existing conditions that could hinder them on the job. I am pretty healthy though, so walked into the waiting room with no fear.

The medical was an array of urine samples and drug tests, vision charts and measurements. And that was just the beginning. When I finally saw an actual doctor, my reflexes, breathing and balance were tested. I lay on the examining table and the doctor listened to my heartbeat. And that’s when he started frowning.

“Did you know you have a heart murmur?” he asked me.

I stared back at him blankly. No, I replied. Memories of my Dads heart attack several years before came rushing back into my head and I remembered our family’s history of heart problems. I immediately thought the worst – but not what the doctor considered the worst.

“You’re going to have to get this checked by your GP,” he explained, deadly serious.

“Will it stop me from starting my new job?” I asked, slightly panicking. If I couldn’t do this job, I’d have nothing. I’d be right back down on the bottom of the heap – somewhere I’d only just managed to crawl out of.

My question didn’t sit well with the doctor, understandably. “Your heart health is more important than any job,” was his icy reply.

Of course I knew this, but unemployment played on my brain. I didn’t want to go there.

I left the doctors office a little while later, worried that all the good luck I’d had in winning this job was now about to come to a screeching halt. I sat on a park bench outside the building, the 5pm busy-ness of the city centre buzzing around me. But it all fell on deaf ears. I rang my GP straight away and made an appointment for the following day.