15 October 2021: Living With the Consequences of a Cardiac Event — A Musical Patient Perspective on Autonomic Vulnerability, Ambiguity, and Partnership

This preprint presents a first-person medical narrative communicated through original musical composition. It recounts the long-term consequences of a catastrophic complication during premature ventricular contraction (PVC) ablation, resulting in left ventricular rupture, acute cardiac tamponade, and emergency open-heart surgery.While the intervention was life-saving, subsequent years were marked by persistent autonomic dysregulation, multisystem instability, and sustained changes in functional capacity. Rather than conventional prose narrative, the medical testimony is embedded within the musical structure itself — rhythm, harmony, motif, and lyrical development reflecting dysautonomia, ambiguity, and recalibration.Drawing on narrative medicine and illness phenomenology (1,4–8), and chronic illness theory (7), the work proposes musical composition as a methodological form capable of representing embodied illness experiences that resist linear description. The composition traces three trajectories: pre-existing autonomic vulnerability, the acute intraoperative crisis, and the prolonged renegotiation that followed.This preprint contributes to medical humanities, patient-experience scholarship, and narrative medicine by suggesting that patient-authored creative works may function not merely as reflection but as qualitative data (11,12) conveying dimensions of illness that structured clinical documentation cannot fully capture