Happy Re-Birthday

Three years ago today I died. I didn't (as far as I can recall) experience the tunnel of light brain seizure, but I was mowing my Mom's lawn and the lights went out.

Okay, I'm not a religious guy, so this will probably drive you nuts if you are oriented towards faith.

You can refer to my thoughts on Intelligent Design (a few posts down) to see I'm not the militant atheist I once was.

When I was a militant atheist I delighted in aggravating religious people (who I believed were mentally ill or not paying attention) by saying things along the lines of, 'I don't need to be born again, my Mom got it right the first time.'

Then I met people who were not obviously mentally ill or fogged over who were deeply religious. My kid brother included, who I regarded as mentally deficient by default when I was growing up. He's actually very bright, probably brighter than I am.

Anyway, I found a different way to be born again. Same Mom even.

For a while leading up to this, when I exerted myself I'd feel out of breath. It felt like I couldn't get enough air in my lungs. Take a deep breath, you feel that relief, but no matter how long I inhaled I didn't feel the relief.

My Dad developed asthma long after he quit smoking, so I figured this was North Carolina's revenge on me for cutting off the funds that used to go to Big Tobacco. I would mow the front lawn of Mom's house, come in and take a breather, then go do the back. At one point, I even thought to ask her about maybe trying one of her nitro pills, see if it made a difference, but Denial stepped in. Denial said, 'You're 32, it's not your fucking heart. You have asthma, you'll have to carry a damned inhaler.'

I wish.

I had applied that spring for a $1 million life insurance policy. With two daughters, one that's autistic, I didn't want to leave my wife unexpectedly and have her have to worry about an income. A single parent with our kids, needs to be able to live on the dividends. Our youngest may be under our roof for good.

It was still in the process when I collapsed after barely starting the back yard. I remember at least one of the times I was mowing having a bit of an ache in my left wrist but someone who types as much as I do often has that. Pop the joint and it usually feels better.

Those auto-shutoff levers that are supposed to save toes. That's what clued Mom in when I collapsed. She called 911 and started CPR. Mom's a retired oncology nurse, so it's not like it's the first time she did CPR on a non-plastic subject.

The ambulance was there in about five minutes, according to Mom. They must have been in the neighborhood because that is way ahead of normal response times 'round here.

They defibrilated me, bagged me, transported me.

My boss called my wife's cell phone wanting to know where the hell I was. I'd told him I'd pick up my paycheck later that day, before I knew I was going to experience cardiac arrest. Hell was a pretty good description for where I was, really, though I don't remember it.

Intubated, cardio-cathed, stented, Frau Lobster got to experience the brunt of this. I don't even remember much of the evening before the heart attack, and the first recollection I have at the hospital, I've got my CDs, a book, and pretty much everyone who's not my wife or Mom or daughters has already visited me. So I'm listening to Coltrane and reading David Sedaris and in a regular room, not ICU.

Friends and relatives came out of the woodwork when I went down. The ones living in New York or the Czech Republic couldn't visit, but friends drove from hundreds of miles to have the same conversation I don't remember.

I have to take their word for it, but it goes something like this:

Friend/Relative: Do you know where you are?
Me: Hospital?
Friend/Relative: Do you know why?
Me: Nope.
Friend/Relative: You had a heart attack.
Me: I'm too fucking young to have a heart attack.

One of my brothers recalls fondly how I had this conversation with Todd (another brother) and after Todd left I had this conversation with Larry-Boy. Several times in a row, I repeated it, then told Larry-Boy, 'I wonder if Todd will come by.'

Frau Lobster first thought I was fucking with people. Then she feared (thanks in part to a real wet-blanket of a doctor) that I was really that out of it and might never be better.

The answer, as it happens, I'm not better than I was before the heart attack, but I'm not worse. I have that blank around the 'event' itself, which is probably a combination of oxygen shortage to the brain, the drugs they used to vainly keep me from fighting the tubes, and, I suspect, the jillion volts they ran through me a couple times while defibrilating me. What got my heart going again would have had to overload my nervous system, brain included, with juice and that might not be the best thing for short-term memory.

I've gotten back some of the night before, which included a jazz lover's pub crawl. A friend got a picture of me chatting up Stan Kessler on a couch at 210 at Fedora's, a club I haven't been to on any other occasion, and that jogged a foggy recollection of what the place looks like. Have no idea what me and Stan talked about, and I don't remember seeing Guido there (who took the pic).

I also remember taking the bus from 18th & Vine to the Plaza as part of the tour. And that a certain (I won't name names) pianist I saw was even more of a jive-ass fuckup than I'd heard.

The day of, the lawn mowing, I don't know if those memories are from that day or of similar days in the weeks leading up to the attack.

It's getting past my bedtime, and there's more to tell. I visited my Dad at KU when he had bypass surgery less than a month after my attack. He'd had a couple of angioplasties before this. My Uncle Kenny who built me the guitar is a heart attack survivor. My Mom was already on nitroglycerin for her symptoms when she was giving me CPR. They'd give her a stress test and tell her everything was fine.

They told her this for four years, and a few weeks ago they finally did a cardio-cath on her, put a pair of stents in her right coronary artery, where there was an 80% blockage that somehow eluded other detection methods.