Life takes an unexpected twist — in a heartbeat

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/10/2024 (661 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In March, I wrote a column about mortality for the Free Press headlined “Here, for a limited time only — life.”

It was written when my husband and I were in southern Italy following his second hip replacement — sun in winter being a real balm for body and soul.

He’s nine years older than me and has faced several health challenges in the past decade. I wrote about how I gave up my full-time job to spend more time with him, not knowing as I was writing that he was strolling the cobblestone streets of old Bari with a time bomb in his chest.

What we thought was gastroesophageal reflux disease, with its accompanying flare-ups of chest and back pain, turned out to be something much more sinister. No wonder none of the medication worked.

An angiogram last month revealed six blockages in his heart, three of them severe.

The cardiac surgeon gave us a copy of the angiographic readout. There it was in black, white and grey: a computer drawing of my husband’s heart with squiggly lines depicting the paths of veins and arteries. Ominous black sections in this roadmap of the heart showed where the worst blockages were — one of them in a stent inserted after his heart attack in 2015.

“You’ll only get 10 years out of a stent,” a doctor told us last month, matter-of-factly.

If only we had known that nine-and-a-half years ago. Five years ago. Six months ago.

I felt my own heart constrict at the thought of how many times my husband might have dropped dead in the interim.

I pictured him pedalling vigorously on his exercise bike for 20 kilometres at a stretch, followed by a daily regimen of push-ups and sit-ups. Saw him hurrying through airports and train stations with heavy luggage. Prying a great concrete footing out of our garden and heaving it out of the way. Wielding a pick in stony ground to make flower beds. Shovelling mountains of rock-hard snow after “snowmageddon” in St. John’s in 2020. Helping a friend move furniture. Lugging 20 garbage bags full of damp mulch out of the car.

Death could have tapped him on the back in any number of locales, both breathtakingly scenic and utterly mundane.

I think of how hard his poor heart must have been working to get blood past all those obstacles and I wonder that he is here at all.

Now he has been incised; dissected; his arm, leg and chest sliced open to harvest veins and arteries to create detours around those potentially deadly roadblocks. I imagine little orange signs in his chest: Detour ahead. Please choose alternate route.

A triple bypass makes him eligible for membership in the euphemistically named “Zipper Club.” There are virtual chapters online, including a website where “heart warriors” gather to share their fears and anxieties and hopes for the future.

I only wish the surgical experience had been as unobtrusive as inserting a zipper over his sternum and pulling down the tab, but this is flesh and blood we’re talking about. His sutures mark a grisly jagged line down the centre of his chest. When they heal, the scar will be a constant reminder of his narrow escape.

I recall the birthday card a friend gave my husband years ago. It showed the Grim Reaper reflected in the side mirror of a car. “Warning,” it said. “Objects may be closer than they appear.”

All this talk of what could have been — what nearly was — may make me sound defeatist, but I can’t help but be acutely aware that alternate scenarios would have changed the plot completely; that I might now be writing about grief and widowhood.

In my March column, I wrote about “wanting to spend more time with him than the few hours snatched between work and sleep.” How lucky I am to have been given more of that precious time.

His traumatic surgery is yet another painful reminder — the most urgent one yet — that good health, longevity, time together are not givens. That the small stuff really doesn’t matter. That just because you fall in love and give each other your heart doesn’t mean they will keep beating ad infinitum.

We — and our happiness — are fragile.

I think of the people who will not get to leave the hospital and of those who never lived to make it there in the first place.

On his first night home post-surgery, we lie tentatively in bed and I see our room with fresh eyes. The dark red walls are lined with paintings and photographs that tell the story of our happy life together.

We reach for each other’s hand and are unspeakably grateful.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s.

pamelajframpton@gmail.com

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