Congenital Heart Disease. That’s what the doctors all said. Bunch of over-paid, eggheads in their stupid white coats, what did they know? So what if they had fancy, medical degrees and shiny plaques they hung on their office walls—they still don’t know what they were talking about, saying that I, the great Rainbow Dash, would die from some stupid “condition”.
They kept using that term: condition, like it meant something to me. All I really heard them say was my heart was too big (well duh; Element of Loyalty). The black and white slides were all fuzzy, and I just couldn’t see what they were all concerned about. The only thing I saw were a bunch of organs and bones in a perfectly healthy pegasus.
I left the clinic and went to talk it over with Twilight. If it was one egghead I could listen to, it was her. She’d known about my fainting, and the dizziness, and all the other things, and she was the one who told me to go to a quack in the first place. As soon as I knocked on the door, she opened it, as if she’d been expecting me.
“So, how did it go?” she asked, stepping aside to let me in.
I walked into the library and set the envelope I’d been carrying on the table. With my mouth empty, I replied, “Bunch of amateurs don’t know nothin’. They told me I had a ‘condition’.”
Twilight looked at me with concern and it only made me more upset. She used her magic to levitate the envelope off the table and brought it to her face. “Are these the results?” she asked.
I nodded and took a seat on one of the large cushions lying on the floor. The flight from the clinic was only five minutes, but I felt like I’d flown from Canterlot and back…twice…with lead wings. I tried to hide my tiredness from Twilight as she continued to look at me.
“What? I’m fine! Go ahead and look for yourself!” I said with agitation. Finally, she stopped looking at me and undid the seal on the envelope. Five pieces of paper and a transparent photo of my insides slid out, suspended in Twilight’s magic. It must have been about five minutes she stared at those darn things. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell she didn’t enjoy what she was reading.
“Rainbow, I…”
“What?” I asked when she still didn’t say anything. She just stood like a statue with those papers in front of her. I struggled to get off the pillow and walk up to her, but all four of my legs had gone to sleep. They tingled painfully as I tried to wake them up, and I finally managed to approach Twilight.
“Rainbow, this is serious,” Twilight said, looking away from the papers at last. “How have you not had problems before now?”
“Hey! There’s nothing wrong with me, do you hear me? Those papers are all wrong!” I swatted at the papers, and Twilight’s magic aura disappeared from around them. They drifted gently to the floor, but Twilight brought them back up with her magic.
“Yes, there is something wrong, Rainbow. With your lifestyle and habits, this is a big problem,” Twilight said calmly. “Your aorta and left ventricles are—”
“Don’t you start using their words!” I interrupted. “Tell me in normal-pony talk.”
Twilight stopped to think for a moment, obviously thinking of a phrasing I could understand. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say, regardless.
“Your heart is too big.”
“Yeah, I got that much.”
“Only certain parts of it are too big. Those parts have a hard time pushing blood through your arteries,” Twilight said in a painfully slow voice.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I objected. “If they’re bigger, doesn’t that mean they’re stronger?”
“No, it means that when you were young, they were weaker. More muscle grew to compensate, narrowing the pathways the blood flows through. This also makes them beat out of rhythm with the other parts of your heart.