My Wonderful Heart Attack
happened last March while I was hiking with my wife in the
mountains west of Boulder, Colo. The dogs were ranging out ahead as
usual and, except for some heartburn, I felt good as we walked
through the trees.
I said to Pat, “I have some heartburn
and I can;t think what I ate to cause it.”
“Maybe youre
having a heart attack.”
“Don’t be a jerk. I don’t have
any of the symptoms — no pain on the left side, no feeling of
doom. Heart attack!”
“Well, then, let’s keep going.”
We went down a hill and started up another and I started
sweating and, suddenly, lost my energy. “I’m going to have to sit
down.”
Pat ran to call for help. I lay on a log for a
while, felt a little better and started to walk back the way I
came. By the time I reached the road, an ambulance was there.
“Sorry, guys,” I apologized. “It was just a false alarm.
I have heartburn. As a matter of fact, it’s moved down from where
it was.” They didn’t listen. I got oxygen. I got on a gurney. I got
taken to the hospital. The last thing I remember saying as I was
pushed into the emergency room was, “This is going to be
expensive.” I was in an induced coma for the rest of the month.
They say I died twice.
I’d read about backpackers like
me, or triathletes, who, after competing, came home, sat on the
couch and died. My heart attack was not entirely unexpected: Most
of my nearest relatives have died from heart attacks. A clump of
plaque or something breaks loose and clogs up an artery. In my
case, it was the infamous widow-maker or ventral artery. There is
no way to detect this. Earlier, I’d volunteered for an extensive
cardiovascular study at the University of Colorado — stress
tests, EKGs, basal metabolism, thousands of dollars worth of tests
— and I was judged in the top 5 percent of my age group.
Given the high risk factor my family history created, I tried to
control some of the things I could and boasted a slow heart rate,
low cholesterol and low blood pressure. But the first thing my
Wonderful Heart Attack taught me is that you do not stay in shape
to avoid a heart attack; it’s to enable you to recover faster from
a heart attack.
The second thing my Wonderful Heart
Attack did was answer the question we the living have, and for me,
there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no aura of peace and
happiness, no favorite dogs. There wasn’t even a fiery glow beneath
my feet, though one religious friend said that’s only because I
wasn’t dead enough.
When death came knocking at my
heart’s door, it tore me out of life-as-usual and gave me the gift
of more time. This sounds silly, but the world was brighter, more
vivid, crisper. Everything around me had a clarity I haven’t
experienced since I was a kid. I was sitting in an aspen grove not
long ago, looking at the brilliant green grass with daisy,
horsemint and trillium scattered through it. The sunlight ignited
the trees into brilliant torches and there was the smell of
green-growing things floating in the air. A light breeze set the
aspen leaves rustling and there was the always-summer sound of a
grasshopper’s wings clattering somewhere beside me. It was all
everyday magic that I had forgotten.
I started cardiac
rehabilitation and over the weeks and months my aerobic capacity
has increased. I belong to a fitness club and am in better physical
shape than I was before. I am seeing the world from a bicycle seat
rather than an automobile.
My Wonderful Heart Attack has
changed other things, too: No more sausages, no caffeine, lots of
fiber, vegetables and fruits. No more casual smoking. I’d always
thought about switching to a healthier diet, and now I am doing it.
I have found that the people around me are more important than the
things around me.
Joseph Campbell said in one of his
books that the meaning of life is the experience of living. I think
I know what he meant. The meaning of life doesn’t come from some
reward in the hereafter, or even from doing good works in the here
and now. It’s something Candide discovered while working in his
garden: My Wonderful Heart Attack has given me more time to
experience being alive.
But finally, my Wonderful Heart
Attack was truly wonderful because I survived it.
Rob Pudim is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives
in Boulder, Colorado, where he works as an editorial cartoonist for
newspapers around Colorado, collects butterflies and draws
caricatures of Westerners, including
himself.
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