One year ago today . . .
After my father
died of a heart attack at the age of 58, I had experienced sympathetic chest
pains for months after the funeral. Despite being profoundly scared standing
next to my father’s bed, knowing from that experience the symptoms of a failing
heart, when my turn came over forty years later, I was not surprised I waited
almost a full day before driving myself to the hospital, something the experts
say you should never do. Famous last words in many cases, I guess, but the pain
was hardly severe, not at all like the pain radiating across my father’s back
that had made him sick to his stomach. What I thought while driving to the
hospital—stopping at every red light—was getting a cure for the annoying
discomfort before the weekend. I had books to read and writing to be done.
It began Thursday
evening with discomfort behind the sternum, from stress I thought from
financial concerns in retirement and because my wife was ill. Took aspirin and
meds for my arthritis and went to bed. Awoke at 4:30 Friday morning—long before
daylight—with the same discomfort and knew that was unusual but went back to
sleep for a while, always the best way to escape concerns, or the best way to
die for that matter, as several people I knew had done, to sleep, perchance to dream before sudden painless nothingness.
Inclined as most men are when it comes to doctors and hospital, I put off doing
anything, always aware of the discomfort and now some pain on the back of my
left bicep—something felt plenty of times from arthritic pain in that shoulder.
For short periods of time, the discomfort and bicep pain were joined by slight
pain along the jawline and all were with me until early afternoon Friday.
Getting admitted
to the emergency room was rapid, dizzying. It became the beginning of the story
of how to avoid paperwork and waiting in a room full of sick people. I told the
ladies through the round hole in the glass, I
know this may sound dramatic, but I need to see if I’m having a heart attack.
From the moment of uttering those words until I was on the gurney in an
operating room, naked except for a gown, shivering because it was so cold in
the room until one of the men put a warmed blanket on me, in that span of an
early quick EKG and an emergency room doctor asking if I knew I was in atrial
fibrillation and had high blood pressure (no to the first, never ever had the
second), from the moment of being on a gurney and racing down a hall while
talking on a cell phone to Dee who was too sick to come to the hospital and
telling her I was headed to the cath lab, from being amid a gathering heart
team and after the cardiologist introducing himself and me sort of echoing my
father by asking if the doctor was any good, from that first utterance about
checking to see if I was having a heart attack to having a line installed from
groin to heart along mysterious pathways and three stents installed in an
artery with 99% blockage, in that time, thank you, thank you, thank you, far
less than one hour had raced by.
I was never in a
great deal of pain, feeling only flushed warmth during the procedure. There was
some pain from two IVs, some slight pain from the shaved pubic start of the
pathway to the heart. The endless blood gathering always hurt and bruised, but
the most pain came from countless sticky contact pads for always awkward and
tangled lifelines connected to them. Despite shaving various hairy areas, the
worst pain was the removal of two hand-sized sticky pads stuck to chest and all
the hairs upon it in case my heart needed some shock therapy. After just one
firmly fixed pad was yanked off I was ready to confess all the bad things I had
ever done.
There is always a
value to serious illness. After my daughter’s battle with encephalitis, it was
learning not to sweat the countless and ultimately meaningless small stuff that
makes up so much of life. Her illness also brought an appreciation of living in
the moment. True of all serious illness, I guess. But I learned something
entirely different from having a heart attack.
Dreading it
despite knowing it is mostly an infinitesimal part of living, I have always
been afraid of the actual act of dying since I was old enough to understand the
process. Somehow, lying there on the table before snaking a line up to my heart
and installing three stents to save my life, despite knowing I could go into a
full-blown attack and die, I felt no great fear, and part of that may have been
the speed of the process from when I first spoke to the lady at the ER window.
It was a feeling that one of the shoes had dropped, that finally the end
process had become visible. Not that I wanted it or welcomed it, but it was a
dance with the actual end game that binds all humans most strongly to each
other.
I am not sure
what the lack of fear during that dance with mortality meant ultimately. Maybe
I became a slightly better person. Wife and children would have welcomed that
early on. Maybe I appreciated even more the time I had left, a grand gift,
enjoying family and watching granddaughters grow into beautifully brilliant
young women. But other nagging fears crept in, no doubt to balance my earlier
lack of fear when I was having the heart attack, small daily concerns: the
blood thinner that immediately created problems; being told not to miss taking
another drug because I now had foreign bodies in my artery and the body loves
to clot around anything not its own.
Lovely.
A half-century
after my father died from his heart attack, two decades after Jennifer’s
illness, I was just glad there was another lesson learned from my illness: sometimes
you do have to sweat some of the small stuff because some of it can kill you.
