Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren Read Free Book Online Page A

stave off loneliness for so long,” I write, a day after the exam. “Nobody to talk to about the ordinary stuff of life onan ordinary day. Miss that dearly…MLKing jr day [and] i weep away, while listening to spirituals: Marian Anderson and others—‘Give me Jesus’ ‘Deep River’… i am washed away with feeling…just so so sad sometimes…” The entry ends with a two-word paragraph: “sadness reigns.”
    I continue to keep a record of my problems while swimming and exercising, and for a few days I try to believe—who wouldn’t?—that Dr. Katz is right: what I have is asthma, and not heart disease.
    Less than a week after the exam, the shortness of breath while swimming coming more often and at shorter intervals, I decide to try the inhaler. I telephone Dr. Katz to tell him about my concerns. In my medical record for this day, Dr. Katz’s entry:
    January 24, 1999
    Phone call:
    He has been monitoring his breathing difficulties while swimming. On a normal day he will swim up to 24 lengths w/o stopping. At times when his chest gets tight he will stop after 8 lengths and recuperate and then swim more shorter intervals. He also gets some tightness when he walks out in the cold. One of his sons has similar sx [symptoms]. His father died at age 70 [72] of emphysema. I had given him a prescription for an inhaler which I recommended taking 1 or 2 puffs of prior to swimming. He does have an ETT [stress test] scheduled in about 1½ wks.
    The inhaler, alas, doesn’t help, and when it doesn’t, I return to my sense that there is something terribly wrong with my heart, and with my life, “worried re my heart,” I write, “tho david thinks it is asthma, but i take puffs of the stuff and it doesn’t seem to make a diff. I do 14 lengths pretty easily, but then the pool goes from 6 lanes to 2, and I am not up to fighting and circling and the rest… a bit of panic, apprehension, anxiety here.”
    At the same time that my anxieties about my heart are increasing, I continue to record everyday occurrences that, in their happy abundance, would seem to belie anxiety. Among other events itemized on the day I first use the inhaler, for example: I talk with Miriam about wedding plans; I talk with a friend and former student, Bret Lott, whose novel has been chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club; Iwork on a course in Jewish American literature I’ll be teaching in the spring at UMass; I make final revisions on my novel. I also write about looking forward to driving down to New Haven the next day, where I will give a talk at the medical school, spend time with Jerry and Gail, and attend the closing on their new house with them.
    Despite what seems a full, rich, and good life—and despite my trying to convince myself that it is a full, rich, and good life—my loneliness continues bone deep, and for the first time I find I am asking the same question Phil will ask: “but i do feel so alone, and with the drug not making a diff (on the first day), the isolation leads to that other realization: Who will take care of Jay?”
    Ellen telephones, and talks about how she wants to get back together, and to care for me. Given the burdens in her own life (a ten-year-old son with a disability that requires constant, exhausting attentions), this seems to me as impossible in the future as it has proven to be in the past. (“I didn’t want to say anything before,” Miriam says to me in London, “but after all the years of raising the three of us and taking care of your brother and of Grandma, what were you doing with a woman with a disabled son?” A busman’s holiday? I reply. Miriam smiles, and repeats what she and her brothers have said before: “It’s your time now, Dad.”)
    On January 26 I report on a conversation I have with Robert’s social worker, who urges me to talk with Robert about how he will spend