Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren Read Free Book Online

summary fashion, about the New Year’s Eve party and the lovely times with my children, then add: “yet i am doleful, sad, in the extreme at times.” A few lines later: “concerned re the breathlessness, and possible heart stuff, damn! fuck.”
    For the next ten days I keep scrupulous track of how many lengths of the pool I swim, how often I have to stop, how well or poorly I am sleeping, how much pain I am having between my shoulder blades, and, given my emotional state, now labile in the extreme, I spend more and more time, in longer and longer entries, indulging in and rationalizing away my fears:
    To sleep near 1 AM , and wake just past 5. Feeling ok tho: best when working on book… but when i take a break, the loneliness settles in, bone deep. [January 9]
    miserable snowstorms all around us…ice, then 8 inches of snow, then rain, then snow, then sleet… i take my time shoveling…v glad to be having physical monday. almost laugh re my anxieties: yes, i became breathless, etc, anxious (minor panic disorder?)…but jay: you did climb to top of st pauls…you did do 50 pushups…but want to get to bottom of the loss of breath, and, during walks, the burning sensation betw shoulder blades [January 15]
    The sweetest, easiest most peaceful feeling mid day yesterday—and again before sleep: the book is done, and all is well. I swim an easy 48 lengths, without breathlessness—24 + 24, and am less breathless at end than I have been when i stopped at 12 or 10 or 18. so, diagnosis: acute anxiety re being able to make it. [January 17]
    â€œAnnual physical today—first in 2½ years!—and eager to get david’s diagnosis, if any, re shortness of breath,” I write on the morning of January 18. The next morning I report the results.
    January 19, 1999
    Good news at physical exam. Blood pressure not a problem. Starts at 150/90—but goes down, on next readings, to 130/84.
    No other problems. Talk over the shortness of breath with David, and he recommends a stress test—to see if any coronary disease, incipient or there. But the more we talk, the more he tends toward interp of late-blooming mild asthma. Confirmed a bit when he gives me basic breath strength test—blow into a tube. I come out below average for age and size, whereas given my good condition, we would expect at least average or above average.
    I give Dr. Katz a detailed description of my symptoms and also talk with him about the breakup with Ellen and my feelings of depression. Since I have never had a stress test, Dr. Katz suggests I schedule myself for one with a local cardiologist, Dr. Flynn, and if that proves negative, as he expects it will, we might see about a pulmonary function test. Noting that the quality of the air in our region of New England is especially bad (pollution from industries in the Midwest settling over the Connecticut Valley), and given my below-average score when I blow into a tube (he jokes about the cardboard tube, called a peak flow meter, being state-of-the-art technology), his best guess is that I am suffering from a mild case, not unusual in our area of Massachusetts, of adult-onset or exercise-induced asthma. He gives me a prescription for an inhaler and suggests, should the shortness of breath continue or increase, that I take one or two puffs from it before swimming.
    In my journal, this: “go for a swim, and feel again the constriction start in throat and chest, high up—also: cold weather and asthma discomfort go together, as with me. but: schedule for stress test [the first appointment I can get is in three weeks time: for February 5]… and may or may not get breathalizer, to see if that helps.”
    Despite the fact that Dr. Katz, like his nurse four weeks before, sees little likelihood of coronary artery disease, and nothing urgent about my condition, my own sense of urgency—fueled by my loneliness—mounts.
    â€œBusyness will only