of a problem with my heart? What symptoms? Someday, the doctor had said . . .
“Quit shaking the bed,” my third wife said to me one night. It was late January 1982.
“I’m not shaking the bed,” I answered.
“You’re shaking it,” she insisted.
“Go to sleep,” I said.
“How can I sleep with the bed shaking like this?” my wife demanded.
The bed was shaking. I looked under the bed. There used to be things that slept under my bed when I was a kid. Godzilla. Zombies.
There was nothing under my bed but the banana sandwich I hadn’t finished the night before. Godzilla wouldn’t eat a day-old, half-eaten banana sandwich.
“I think it’s your heartbeat,” my wife said. “Your heart is beating so hard, it’s shaking the bed.”
That’s nonsense. There I was, lying quietly in my bed. How could my heart be beating hard enough to shake the bed?
“You had better go to the doctor and get that checked,” my wife said.
I had learned to all but avoid doctors since I was twenty-one. I had gone in for a few routine physicals, but there had been no new developments regarding the fact my aortic valve leaked.
Someday . . .
“Do you really think it’s my heartbeat that is shaking the bed?” I asked my wife again.
“I don’t remember installing a Magic Fingers system in the mattress,” she said. “Go to the doctor.”
I made an appointment at 3 PM with my doctor. I also made a date for a tennis match at 5 PM.
I packed my tennis gear in the back of my car. Two racquets. After you have played tennis for at least ten years, you can carry around two racquets. I drove away from my house, headed for my doctor’s office. My greatest concern was whether I’d be able to get in and out of the doctor’s office in time to make my five o’clock tennis match. Women. Sometimes you have to humor them.
I knew something was wrong when my doctor’s nurse complimented me on the shirt I was wearing soon after I had been given a chest X-ray.
“Hey,” she said, “that’s a sharp shirt you’re wearing.”
The shirt wasn’t sharp at all. It was an ugly, green shirt I had won in a tennis tournament. Actually, I hadn’t won the shirt at all. They gave everybody who played in the tournament a shirt and all the reds and blues were gone when I went to pick out my shirt.
“I really enjoyed your last book,” the nurse continued.
How long did I have, I wondered? Six months tops? They’re never this nice to you in a doctor’s office unless they know something you don’t.
My doctor is a quiet man. He’s never ruffled.
“OH, MY GOD!” I heard him scream from the X-ray room.
I said a prayer. Lord, I said, don’t make me suffer for long.
My doctor came back into the room where I was waiting in my ugly, green shirt.
“Hey,” he said, “that’s a sharp shirt you’re wearing.”
“Give it to me straight doc,” I demanded.
“Come with me,” he said.
My heart was pounding hard enough to shake an entire Holiday Inn.
He put two X-rays up on the screen. One was the X-ray that had been taken of my heart two years previous. The other was an X-ray that had been taken of my heart in the previous twenty minutes.
“This is your heart two years ago,” said my doctor, “and this is your heart now. Notice how much larger your heart is today than it was two years ago.”
I can explain that, I said. I quit smoking and I’ve been getting plenty of exercise. That would certainly account for why I now have a big, healthy heart, rather than the undersized little fellow I had two years ago.
“I’m afraid you don’t understand,” said the doctor. “Your heart has enlarged. I would say about a sixth. This is quite dangerous.”
He explained further.
The aortic valves leaks. Blood seeps back in. The heart is then filled above capacity. It must pump harder to rid itself of the blood. But it is fighting a losing battle. The leak is apparently bigger now than ever. The heart is pumping harder than ever. The heart is a muscle. The harder it works, the larger it becomes. The heart becomes too large, it can’t function.
“And?” I asked.
“And you suffer heart failure and you die,” said my doctor.
I asked for a couch and a six-pack. I settled for a hard chair and a glass of water.
My doctor explained some more:
The pounding heartbeat that had shaken the bed was classic for my condition.
“Cross your legs,” my doctor said.
I crossed my legs, right over left. My right leg bounced up and down with my pulse.
“Look at the pulse in your neck,” he said.
Bam! Bam! Bam! The arteries pounded out of my skin. They call that “pistol pulse.”
My blood pressure. The range was wide. Again, classic for my condition.
Still, I had suffered no shortages of breath. No chest pains. No dizziness when I was sober.
“That will come,” the doctor said.
I didn’t want to ask the question, but I asked it anyway.
“What can you do to repair this?”
“In a word?” the doctor asked back.
“Keep it as simple as you can,” I said.
“Surgery,” he answered.
There would have to be more tests, he said. He even suggested, if I so desired, that I get a second opinion. He also said the situation wasn’t critical . . . yet.
“You might be able to avoid surgery for a time, with some help from drugs and a change in your lifestyle,” he went on, “but there’s no doubt you’re going to have to have a new valve eventually.”
Change in lifestyle. No tennis?
“I wouldn’t recommend you play tennis until we know more,” he said.
I asked if I could use his phone. I called my opponent I had scheduled for five o’clock.
“I can’t make tennis today,” I said.
“How about tomorrow?”
“I can’t make that, either.”
“How about next week?”
“Nope.”
I was fighting back the tears.
“So when can you play?”
“God knows.”
“You okay?”
“Nope.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Someday.”
“Huh?”
“Someday. It finally came.”
My doctor sent me to another doctor, and that doctor listened and felt and poked and prodded and ordered more tests. I took the standard EKG and then I took something called an Echocardiogram where they send sound waves into your heart, and when they had done all that, they still didn’t know much more than they had known before, so they scheduled me for a cardiac catheterization.