As I lay on the doctor’s bed in my blue-dotted white hospital gown, I didn’t know that the heart I once had would go back to the way it was when I was born.

I felt cold, sticky jelly on my chest. It was put on an object with a camera inside that looked at my heart. I saw the blue, red and yellow levels in different places on the screen, calculating my body’s internal temperature.

My mom sat on the other side of the room, scrolling up and down on her smart phone.

“Now, if you turn to your side, I’m going to place the transducer under your rib and apply a little amount of pressure,” my doctor said.

That’s the only thing I didn’t like about echocardiograms – the amount of pressure they have to use to find what they are looking for.

I usually go to the cardiologist once a year, but because we moved and life spun forward, this was my first time back in two years. I always dread putting on that hospital gown and suffering an invasion of personal privacy. They used to take forever, but I think that was also my age. The older I got, the shorter the 45 minutes became.

“Okay, looks like we’re done here,” said the man with the gloved hands. “I will give my results to Dr. Kao, and she’ll be in here to speak with you in a few moments.”

The vintage screen with one side of my heart on camera amazed me. Just an organ shown in black and white, opening and closing: the beats of my heart. An idea sparked in me while I watched.

I couldn’t help myself. It was two days before Selfie Sunday.

I began to take picture after picture of me and, well, me.

The knock on the door startled me. My cardiologist walked in and, instead of going straight to talk to me, she walked over to the monitor where my heart kept beating strong. About two seconds later, the same doctor that performed my echo walked in the room and did the same.

One hand reached down to turn the knob that is measuring the sound waves that are bouncing off my body’s central muscle. Then she turned, looked down, and closed her eyes.

“Destiny, your heart seems to be big and that’s alarming,” she said.

Finally.

The first thing that popped in my head was that it must be because of the type of person I am: I am sweet, helpful, funny and inspiring.

But my real heart is damaged. I never thought that could happen- not again.

“The tricuspid valve that we went in to fix when you were 6 seems to be enlarged again.”

My eyes started to puff up and I began to shake.

Since I had my surgery, they told me that everything was fine and my heart was beautiful every year. They took me off the medication at the age of 12 when I was supposed to be on it for the rest of my life. This is not happening. Not me.

Not now.

“What I want to do is set a date for a cardiac catheter so we can get a closer look at Destiny’s heart,” the woman said to my mother. “If it looks that her valve is deformed enough, then we will have to perform an open heart surgery to fix the valve. If we can’t fix that, then the valve will need to be replaced.”

“How soon is this going to have to happen?” I asked.

When the words “the next couple weeks” reached my ears, my eyes widened and tears formed.

* * *

About two weeks later, my eyes opened up and my ears registered the words spilling from my doctor’s mouth, telling my mom that I was going to need open heart surgery.

I was still under anesthesia so the words were not as alarming as they should have been. In a way, I knew that I was going to go under another time.

It was happening again.

Because of school I knew I couldn’t have my surgery soon. Luckily I kept hearing the voices from everyone in the room.

“There is not an exact rush for Destiny to have the valve replacement, she will just continue to have problems and feel like she has no energy until the surgery happens.”

I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t want to miss school for my surgery, but I also don’t want to wait until summer and feel like I have felt for the past year.

This is going to be hard. But the date has been set.

I am going back to the hospital bed.