This January, I turned 52.
My grandfather, Antonino, died of a heart attack at 52. I never met him and the stories I’ve heard about him from family members always left me wishing I had known him. He came to Brooklyn from a small Sicilian town when he was only 12 years old. He was alone. People talk of him as having a deep and profound kindness. My Mom was with him when Jackie Robinson played his first major league baseball game for their beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. When Mr. Robinson came out on the field, she asked her father why some people booed. “Because they’re ignorant,” he said. That alone made me love a man I never met. If there were any single grandparent that my brothers and I resemble, it would be him; we all have his dark eyes the same pudgy chin.
All my life, the age 52 felt significant. I was relieved when my parents passed that number and now my husband has passed it, too. But it’s just the beginning of 52 for me.
I had been having severe bouts of back pain for several months. Always in my left shoulder blade; always debilitating but rarely lasting more than 20 minutes. I would have to stop everything I was doing, lie down or stretch, and wait for it to pass. It felt like there was a fist just to the left of my spinal column, tightening and twisting all the muscles in its clenches. I would sweat and it often felt like a hot flash. But it never moved forward to become a classic chest pain; I never had jaw or neck pain or numbness in my arms. None of the other signs of a heart attack – even the strange “women’s heart attack signs” – were never apparent.
Nonetheless, the pain was becoming more frequent and scarier. So I saw my primary care physician, told her all about it and she gave me an EKG and scheduled a stress test. That was on Wednesday, March 18.
I had one or two more of the intense back pains after that and one of them was so bad that I swore to myself that I’d go to the emergency room the next time it happened. On Friday night, Greg sat me down for a serious talk. He was very concerned about this pain, but especially frustrated by my inability to quit smoking. I was frustrated, too. While we were in Asheville I made several attempts to quit but never got past 3 days without smoking. Something always presented itself as a convenient excuse. I could always justify just one more cigarette. I got into the habit of buying “one-sies” or “loosies” at a local convenient store and somehow that seemed less insidious than buying an entire pack.
But I really don’t want to write about quitting smoking at this juncture. Some day, maybe, but not now. I tried everything in the past: cold turkey, Nicorette gum, inhalers, acupuncture, hypnotism, you name it. Nothing worked. I never really wanted to quit. I loved smoking. It had been the only truly steady and reliable thing in my life for the past 30-something years.
For the past couple weeks, I haven’t been able to get beyond this paragraph. I haven’t been able to really write about that Saturday night. I don’t know why. I’ve told the story verbally many times; I’m kind of sick of repeating it. I’ve made it into something of a comedy routine.
But now I wish I had never told anyone. It doesn’t make me special or unusual or privileged. It often makes me feel lonely and out of step with my peers, much the way being a widow at age 36 did. People are well meaning and often don’t know what to say, just like when Will died 16 years ago. That only makes me impatient with them. I get emails saying, “Let us know when you’re ready for some company,” as though I’m lying in bed all day ringing a bell for a servant to bring me a bowl of low-salt broth. I get questions like, “So what are you doing with your life now?” It hasn’t even been two weeks; I’m still in shock. I had a heart attack; it wasn’t expected or scheduled. So I don’t know what recovery looks like.
April 10, 2009
It’s been three weeks today. Here goes.
On Saturday, March 21 I had a few American Spirit cigarettes left; I was smoking them instead of my usual Parliaments to get free of some of the chemicals that regular cigs contained. They were gone by about noon and I told myself I wouldn’t buy any more.
Greg and I took a walk down at the lake with Laf. The back pain was brewing and gathering strength, so we came home, rested a bit and then I made dinner. Afterwards, the pain became truly horrible. Greg put a lidocaine patch on my back and I lay down at around 8 pm. He and Laf must’ve joined me at some point because they were with me in bed, both sound asleep, when the pain woke me up at about 9:45. I was in a sort of twilight state and I had just had a dream or vision of my Dad walking very quickly across the room, away from me. I wanted to get his attention, to talk to him, and I think that’s what woke me up. He never looked at me. This was when I realized the pain had expanded and moved forward into my chest like a freight train; it was shooting down both arms, up into my neck and jaw. I could barely breathe. I tried to wake Greg up; I went to my purse and pulled out my ID and insurance card. Then, believe it or not, I went to the basement and got a clean pair of pants out of the dryer. I almost couldn’t make it back up the stairs; I was so out of breath that it was scary. This time, I got Greg up. He had to help me tie my sneakers because I was too weak. Columbia Hospital is only 5 minutes away, but it felt like an hour. At one point we were at a stop light and a cop pulled up next to us. I wanted to ask Greg to see if he’d give us an escort to the ER; later, I learned that Greg was nervous that the cop was going to stop us because we were going too fast.
I could barely make it to the desk; they got me in to a room immediately, which is pretty amazing for a city hospital on a Saturday night. There was a lot of commotion and running around. In a matter of moments, I had an EKG and IV hooked up to me. The heart monitor sounded weird, even to my untrained ears. I heard the doctor say “BP 245 over 90” and thought, “Christ, that’s high!” Things weren’t feeling good; nurses were running around everywhere, but the doctor’s voice remained calm. I remember his handshake; he had very thick, warm hands and I always appreciate a good handshake. Again, it made me think of my father. He asked me a few specific questions in a measured manner; calm, unfaltering. Dr. W. Dr. Raymond W. He went over to Greg and I could hear him say, “She had a heart attack…well, she’s actually still having a heart attack.” I thought, I’m not ready to go yet am I? No, I’m not ready. It was a calm thought.
A nurse came toward me with a long, clear hose and the sight of it made me panic. I yelled at her: “You’re not going to put that down my throat are you?!” “No, no, no…” she said with some impatience. “I’m just going to…”
And that was that. Blackness.
Imagine a moonless cool October night out on an endless lake. Not out on the lake. In it. Head completely tilted impossibly back into the water, almost splitting my spine in half. No measure of time or space; no sense of distance, no pain. Just empty. Black and empty.
And then that calm voice.
“Are you with us?…Are you with us?…You’re back now, right? You’re back…” Dr. Wallace again.
My head suddenly yanked up out of the blackness; again without pain or any sensation at all. I expected my nose to sting of water, but it didn’t.
“Yeah, I’m back. But where was I?”
There was a sea of faces looking down at me; they were all out of breath, concerned, frowning, worried. All variations on the same intense expression.
“You were gone for a while, but you’re back now.” Dr. W patted me on the shoulder. “You’re going to be all right.”
The sea parted and there was Greg looking like a deer in the headlights. That was the worst part of the whole night; seeing that worried look on his face. It was awful.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I meant to say that I was sorry I smoked all those years, that I didn’t take better care of myself but then I got overwhelmed by nurses putting catheters in me, peeling off my clothes and hooking me up to even more equipment.
One nice thing was that the pain was gone! Maybe I can go home! In fact, I felt great! It turns out that the hose I had dreaded was filling me up with oxygen and nitro glycerin, so I was feeling pretty high. When can I go home? One of the nurses laughed. That’s when I found out what had happened. My heart had gone into a weird rhythm and then I had a seizure. I was gone. They did hand compression at first, but then had to defibrillate me.
CLEAR!
Just like on TV!
A particularly young nurse said, “This might sound weird to you, but that was really exciting! Usually, all we get to deal with in this ER are STDs and stitches. We actually got to use all our skills tonight!” Glad I could accommodate you, now when can I go home?
Well, I was just in a holding pattern for the time being. The next stop was upstairs, in the Cardio Cath Lab. Or something like that. There a team of three nurses and a cardiologist arrived to give me a cardio catheterization and angiogram. Again, the nurses were running around like crazy and I asked one of them why they were in such a hurry. “Because it’s your heart and we don’t want there to be any further damages.” “Oh,” I said, “Carry on.”
She told me that I was going to get some drugs to relax and help with the pain. I just tried to relax on my own. I asked them to keep Greg up to date. One of the nurses said he had someone with him, but I couldn’t imagine who that was. It was around 1 am. The doctor made two incisions in an artery near my groin; one for the camera and one for his instruments. I felt the both incisions and the strange sensation caused by the camera and instruments snaking up my body. Time expanded and contracted in strange ways on that table. I was somewhat detached from the whole situation and was often curious that I wasn’t doing any bargaining with a high being of some kind. And then I was sort of proud of myself for not finding some phony sense of religion just because I was scared. I really wasn’t scared; I didn’t want to die, but I wasn’t all that upset.
And then there was the unmistakable feeling: there were tubes in my heart! Dr. A, the cardiologist, told me I had a 90% blockage in a left artery and a 60% blockage in another. So he put in two stents. I imagined two tiny ships in a bottle going being hoisted in heart, holding my arteries open so the blood could flow again. They slowly pulled out the hoses and I felt an acute, sharp pain.
“OW!”
“You felt that?” a nurse asked.
“Uh…yeah!”
Two of the nurses looked at each other. One said, “I forgot to give her the pain meds!”
I don’t think I was supposed to hear that. The other said, “Well, you’ve tolerated the procedure very well so far, I just have to do this one more stitch…can you take it? Otherwise we have to wait for…”
“Just do it,” I said. Two seconds later, I wished I had waited for the meds, because the stitch hurt like crazy, but at least it was over.
On the upside, Dr. A said there was no damage to my heart. If I took the meds, followed the cardboard diet and stayed off cigs there shouldn’t be any reason for more heart problems. I find this to be almost unbelievable.
For the next 24 hours, the hardest thing for me to do was to stay flat on my back and not move my legs while the stitches in my arteries healed. I was in a cardio recovery unit where I was constantly being monitored; blood pressure was taken automatically every three minutes, the friggin’ bed moved electronically on its own to prevent bed sores and it seemed like someone poked me every 20 minutes.
I pretty much begged them to let me out on Monday, which they did. But I was right back in the ER that night with chest and back pains. So I ended up being in the hospital until Wednesday.
Greg brought me my cell phone and laptop so I was in communication with my world almost as though nothing had ever happened. Which was probably a huge mistake. I wish I could have just let my self truly recover, taken walks, thought about the magnitude of the experience and been completely introspective. I called some key people and then, mistake of all mistakes, announced on Facebook that I’d had a heart attack.
It opened the floodgates to well-meaning lectures, phone calls and a flurry of messages that I just can’t answer right now.
I keep telling myself that people mean well, but I’m having a hard time being gracious.
I’m retreating more and more, wanting less and less to do with anyone. If I get even the slightest hint of a lecture coming at me I can’t get away fast enough, even if it has nothing to do with health.
It’s the tone of lectures that gets to me; it’s the unspoken assumption that the lecturer knows best and is there to instruct you because you couldn’t possibly know better.
I have no idea why this developed, but this is a distinct and overwhelming sensitivity that I hope changes and becomes more balanced.
So, even though I say I’m retreating, I wrote this to at least put part of this experience to rest.
I’m sorry I’ve worried so many people and haven’t returned calls, facebook messages or emails. I just need time and space; a lecture-free zone, no pity or sympathy.
If you see me, don’t pout for God’s sake! I can’t stand that! If you email, please don’t tell me what a life-changing experience I’ve been through. I’m kind of figuring that out. I’ve been to the ER two more times, but Dr. A told me yesterday that I’m doing great.
I’m still me, I just have some supports in my heart. I’ve probably needed them for a long time.
If and when I come out of the other side of this, I may decide that a Life of Moderation is just not for me. Let’s face it, I’ve played Russian Roulette with my health for a very long time and I don’t know if I truly want to change. My new found new ways of eating right, exercising and not smoking might just be my version of finding religion on the way to the electric chair. I might start smoking again; I might just go straight to crack! Who knows? But whatever I do, it’ll be my decision and you’re just going to have to let me make it for myself.
-Brooke
Turns out it was a Newport, which I smoked for at least a year or two in college.
Two days later, I’m at a different counter. This time it’s Walgreens. “Do you have those tiny packs of Virginia Slims?” I ask. “Purple or Green?” asked Counter Man. Well, green could only be menthol so it was purple for me. 
