It is a dream sequence from a movie at this point. Hazy, ethereal, almost as if it could have belonged to someone else. In truth it is my past, a distant past admittedly, but one which haunts me because I always hear the footfalls to the rear and I know that they are getting closer.
The year is 1989 and my mom has just passed away at 58. Way too young for anyone to die, and yet of her 6 siblings she survived the longest. Wasn’t much to work with in that gene pool, was there? Mom suffered a massive heart attack on Good Friday and had triple bypass surgery the next morning. They place some kind of a pump in her femoral artery in order to allow the heart muscle to heal, but Wednesday of the next week brought the dreaded phone call from the hospital that we’d best get to the ICU stat.
The doctor who meets with us is all business as he explains all of the things that went wrong. He said he is sorry for our loss and then looks at mom’s four chunky adult kids and says that given our family history we should all be checked for similar issues. At the time I am 37. We probably tell ourselves that we’ll look into that, but all good intentions are soon forgotten.
Now it is 1997 and I am 45 years old. I am the Branch Manager with one of the most successful industrial supply houses in the country, my two boys are doing well, and my wife is involved in some sordid affair with a truck driver who stops by the warehouse once a week where she works and is apparently delivering more than books. She doesn’t realize that I know, but I am committed to getting my kids through high school before I blow things up. So life is fairly stressful, but the paychecks are good so I stay. Then one day the wife and I are having a heated discussion about something stupid and I feel a burning sensation in my chest. It passes but over time seems to be happening a little more frequently so I go to the doctor.
Physical problems are always a slippery slope, aren’t they? The lipid panel leads to a scan of some kind, which in turn leads to more tests, and eventually I am laying on a table with a tube threaded from my groin all the way up to my heart. There is a little Pakistani doctor of whom I am vaguely aware through the haze of the sedative saying, “Oh no, Oh no, oh no, this is bery, bery bad.” I mutter, “What is bad?” and then I drift back into sedation. The downward progression continues as I meet the surgeon that afternoon. Dr. Valluvan Jeevanandam, now that’s a mouthful, is the surgeon who comes to my room as I recovere from my procedure. He explains to me that I have blocked arteries. I have told one of the doctors about my mother and Dr. J has the results of her angiogram which show blockages in the same spots. It is genetic, it is serious, 85% blockage here and 95% blockage there. Blah, Blah, Blah. Then he adds, “If I were you I wouldn’t leave this facility”. That gets my attention.
I will have the surgery two days hence. I am at the local hospital but Temple University is starting a community outreach program and I am to be the first open heart surgery at the local joint. There is a lot to think about and much to be done and in 36 hours a team of 30 doctors, nurses, and techs will travel from their homes a good distance away to take care of little old me and one other guy who needs a valve job.
Back to Dr. J. The man is a gifted surgeon. He has done many complicated surgeries and is revered in the Philadelphia medical community. They tell me that I am one lucky fellow to have this guy. He is going to take an artery from my forearm for one of the grafts. He developed a technique that won’t cause nerve damage to the hand. As for me, I really don’t care. I have a time bomb in my chest and I just want it defused. By the way, in case you are curious, the good Doctor left Philadelphia and is now the top dog at the University of Chicago. We still exchange emails once in a while.
The surgery begins at 7:30 AM. This is the last thing I remember, seeing the clock at 7:30. The next thing I know it is 23:00 on a different clock when I open my eyes. “He’s awake”, I hear someone yell and then there are people all over me. I have a ventilator tube down my throat, my hands are tied down, and I am sweltering hot because they have been bringing my body temperature up with thermal blankets. Later that night, after removing the ventilator and all the tubes and leads two sadistic male nurses help me out of the bed and into a chair so that I can begin my recovery. Later still, as I am helped back to bed I lay there and think to myself that I will get better, but I am on a ticking clock because I have been repaired; not cured. Someday things will go to hell once again.
These thoughts will cause me to go into a dark place for a long while. Depression is the usual term. As I complete my cardiac rehab I will tell my wife what I suspect and what I know about her affair. I will tell her that I am leaving and we work out details about the divorce. I get a wild hair up my butt and transfer out to Minnesota of all places. In my mind I reason that moving across country is just as easy as moving across town. That logic turns out to be spot on. The pace of life is just a step more relaxed out here on the prairie. I tell people all the time that moving west has added twenty years to my life. Anyway, back in the summer of ’97 on the weekend that Princess Dianna died I arrive in my new home.
Life will also get better for a long time to come. The kids will follow me within a couple of years. They will grow up, get married, and have kids of their own. The thing is, I know that somewhere deep within my chest there is a repair that will eventually begin to fail. That thought is the footfalls that I mentioned which I hear behind me. I can’t be positive but I think that they are getting closer, much closer.
I have an Echocardiogram done every few years. It is like the canary in a coal mine, the early warning system when something goes pear shaped. A little while back I had one of these tests and apparently one of the canaries died. So now, after 19 very, very short years I have been scheduled for a nuclear scan and a profusion stress test. There is a thickening of the left ventricular wall which has my cardiologist concerned. Less elasticity means less blood pumped though the chamber which means eventual congestive heart failure. In the short term, if they don’t like what they see I will probably have to undergo another angiogram. I can see where this is going, in my head at least.
Yes, I feel like it is all going to hell. Yes, I am beginning to wonder if the repairs are ready to give way. Yes, I recognize the symptoms of my depression. I am withdrawing. I am no longer engaging. I am sitting here like a dufus waiting for the other shoe to drop. To me it feels like another unfortunate twist in, what has surely been, a couple of twisted years. The thing is that I know that each and every one of you has stuff going on in your lives. I am not special in any way. In some way we are all dealing with stuff. When I feel like this I always remember my father’s reaction at mom’s funeral to the comfort that the priest was trying to offer. Rev. Gallagher looked into my dad’s eyes and went on about picking up the pieces and moving forward. He said, “And Howard, don’t forget, that god will never give you more than you can handle,” to which my father responded, “Maybe not, preacher, but it is getting pretty goddamned close.”
And that is how it is for me, pretty goddamned close.”