You chew the aspirin because it works faster. Seconds count when it comes to addressing the blockages to your heart. Amazing, how much knowledge you can aquire flat on a gurney, looking up toward the ceiling tiles if not heaven.
Then the nitroglycerin tab was administered sublingually, and my head throbbed, right on schedule, a fair price to pay for desired vasodilation. Nitroglycerin has a bitter taste, but I was rolling around on my tongue sublingually, a sweet word. I was also thinking this was shaping up to be a strange birthday. I was hoping it wouldn’t be my last.
When I appeared at my doctor’s reception desk a few moments before, I was woozy, and I complained about a powerful pressure in my chest like I had never felt. The other details now blur. I was led to a seat and somebody called 911. Every twenty-five seconds somebody in America is having a coronary event. So far none of these Americans had been me.
The fire department arrived.
“What hospital do you prefer?”
I must have been disoriented because I said, “Someplace in Rome.”
“Good idea,” the fireman said. “I’ve never been.”
Come on, Rome may be my favorite city on earth, but I should have opted for exactly where I was, the Bay Area, Northern California. They did an EKG. There was reason. It was as if a python had wrapped itself around my chest; I was sweating and lightheaded. My arm tingled. My throat hurt. Blood pressure was through the roof.
“Do you have family?”
I scanned my memory bank for Zorba the Greek’s reply to that very question, “Wife, children, the full catastrophe,” but I came up blank.
“Is there somebody we should call?”
In the back of my mind, I was reasoning: if my wife or son showed up it would prove I was in big trouble. If they didn’t, maybe this wasn’t happening.
Three years earlier, the celebration of my birthday with a zero in the number took the form of a fake prom. It was held in a school gym, thematically decorated. One hundred fifty friends were attired as for their own big high school night. A portrait photographer immortalized images against a cheesy retro backdrop. The fabulous R&B band hired for the occasion let me sing lead for The Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” My tux-wearing son, the consummate MC and roaster, got the laugh when he suggested it was past time for me to buy wine futures. Perfect night. Perfection was not my aspiration now. My current, pressing goal was tomorrow.
Once in the ER, a flurry of activity. Behind the drawn curtain I was attended to by what appeared to be a score of eerily professional and ethereally kind men and women, a diversity of age and race and ethnicity, a snapshot of California. More EKGs, a chest X-ray, two more nitroglycerin tabs, blood draws. The oxygen refreshed. The monitors beeped and chuffed, buzzed and hummed.
“What day is it?”
“Who is the president?”
“What is your name?”
“Where do you live?”
“What is the year?”
“What is your name?
“What is the year?”
The attending, who looked young enough to have once been a student of mine, gently but firmly broke the news. My ticket had been punched for the night. I was going to be admitted. The first furious round of blood test results and EKGs were encouraging, but we had a ways to go. I balked at the prospect of a hospital stay. “It’s my birthday,” I said. Patti and I had dinner reservations. The doc glanced at my hospital wristband identification to verify. “It is your birthday.” He returned two minutes later bearing a chocolate cupcake with swirled blue icing, a tongue depressor serving as a candle. “Happy birthday.”
On birthdays I usually try and summarily fail to write a poem. My attempts invariably lead to meaning-of-life dime store philosophy, which is the death knell of poetry. I long ago resigned myself. Never would I compose my version of Dylan Thomas’s great “Poem in October”: “It was my thirtieth year to heaven…”
The chest pressure by now had alleviated. Calm settled over me, the wait for resolution commenced. Alone inside my darkened, curtained-off space I felt the hours slowly pass, like boats approaching the horizon. Having nothing to do, I struggled to solve mentally a problem afflicting a new book I was working on. I got nowhere. I hoped the point would not become moot. I took a peek at what was downloaded onto my phone, read a mystery written in grade school Italian, then tried some Montaigne, my favorite, but nothing was filtering through.
Only then did I call my wife. She was distressed. I told her not to worry. Note to self: when has that move ever worked? She wanted to come to the hospital. Let’s wait, I insisted, irrationally confident I would be discharged soon. She reluctantly complied. Was denial a virus going around today?
I may have dozed. A wonderful nurse appeared. I don’t believe I hallucinated her. In four hours they would draw more blood. They were on the trail of an enzyme called troponin. It is a reliable marker of a cardiac event, and they needed a retest. She looked optimistic. The ER may be a strange location to promote social intimacy, but it could be the opposite. She wanted to know if I was Italian. She once had an Italian boyfriend, she confided. She said every woman needed at least one Italian bad boy boyfriend. I couldn’t validate that point, but this did not prevent her from throwing out some idiomatic expressions, including “Ti voglio bene,” the charmingly indirect Italian way of saying “I love you.” She wasn’t addressing me, but it was nice to hear the sentiment anyway.
Afterward I couldn’t help but listen to the disembodied voices bouncing off the walls. The abject moaning, as of a suffering animal, from a far-off corner. The demented but eloquent articulations of an elderly woman one bed over, invisible behind the curtain. The rich baritone of docs examining one patient after another. “Where did you get these bruises?” “How many times did you fall?” “Do you remember if you ate today?” “Take a deep breath.”
As lightning bolts go, here’s one I should have seen coming. Where else would I prefer to be on my birthday if not here? It was good to be reminded, as if I needed to be, how brief life is, how tenuous the hold we have on our loved ones. The makings of a poem? No, at least not for me. And the dime store philosophy seemed anything but.
My doctor eventually informed me test results had all gone my way. “It’s probably a negligible risk being discharged, but you need to see the cardiologist right away, do a treadmill test ASAP. Happy birthday.”
So this was a fake heart attack?
“It’s a good thing you came in,” said the doctor.
I dressed and got into my car.
Walking into my home after spending eight hours in the ER, I could see I may have made a bad mistake not encouraging Patti to come to the hospital. I could tell she was very distraught. “Some kind of birthday,” she said. We plied free a few rogue EKG tabs clinging to my chest, my legs. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “It’s not the same without you.”
No one had ever said such a thing to me before. I found the woman I was always looking for.