Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren Read Free Book Online Page B

his days when he’s back in the city.
    i call robert at about 9 [PM], and he yells at me for waking him… and i feel so fucking lousy: same old, same old…not to be able to say back: hey, go fuck yourself—where do you get off treating me like this???
    evening, after swim, sans progress [with inhaler], I am really worried that the pain between shoulder blades is some kind of blockage at the aorta…
    But if I’m in such good shape, and if I have little in my history that suggests the possibility of coronary artery disease, and if my doctor diagnoses asthma and sees no urgency about checking out heart disease, why, even while in part of me I was rationalizing awaysymptoms, did I, at the same time, feel more and more certain that something was gravely wrong? Why, that is, were my intimations of mortality at least as strong as my inclination to denial?
    On January 27, before I drive down to New Haven, I telephone Rich.
    we shmooze and i ask if he minds my checking in re problem, and i go thru it with him…he asks me to fax him results [of the stress test], and not to hesitate re talking, also says: everything else is in my favor—200 cholesterol, low weight, no smoking, exercise, etc…it is rare for pain to be in mid back, but it does happen… what we want to do is to exclude things: so let us check this out… at our age, we need to pay attention to stuff, but even if we find something, there are lots of things we can do.
    rich: sign of heart [disease] is that exercise makes the pain come, and then it goes away…
    During our conversation, I also mention that once before—a year and a half ago—I had gone to see my doctor about pain between my shoulder blades. The pain had been there, on and off, for some time, and I had ignored it until, during a talk with my cousin Jerrold, who lives in Jerusalem, I had asked about his father’s death. Had it been peaceful? Jerrold said it had—that his father (my father’s younger brother, and the youngest of nine), eighty-two at the time, had been sitting at the table with them, eating and talking, when, after complaining of pain in his back, he had suddenly slumped over, and died.
    I called for an appointment that day, and I saw Dr. Katz three weeks later. Dr. Katz did an EKG and, based on our conversation and my having noticed that the pain, which could last anywhere from one to ten minutes, sometimes occurred in the middle of the night, or when writing had drained me and I needed food, concluded (this from his notation in my medical record): “cardiac etiology of the pain is extremely unlikely. Thoracic [chest] aneurysm also unlikely. Most likely etiology may be gastrointestinal such as esophageal reflux or spasm.”
    Looking back, one wonders if this pain—persisting for at leastfour years—was related to what may then have been, or have been becoming, coronary artery disease. I recall, too, and describe for Dr. Katz—as I now do for Rich—a time when, flying to Europe two years before this on my way to teach for a semester at the University of Freiburg in Germany, I awoke in the middle of the night in a very dark, quiet, and mostly empty plane (I was stretched out across several seats), to find my heart pounding away. I was sweating profusely, and felt a pain so severe in the middle of my back—along with dizziness and faintness—that I recall thinking, as if it were the simplest fact: I am dying . And then, as if from a Henry James story: So—is it here, at last, the great thing? I remember being afraid to get up and walk to a flight attendant to ask for help (afraid I was so weak and dizzy I might not make it), or to buzz for one and thereby create a crisis, and I recall thinking too: Well, Neugie, if this is it, this is it .
    I had had some champagne before the in-flight meal, a glass or two of red wine with the meal, and cognac after the meal, and at the time I attributed the pain,