CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Heartbreak

O

n March twenty-sixth, everything changed, and our world crashed.

In this pre-cell phone era of the 1980s, I was in the habit of checking in with Michel at some point during his workday, from whatever pay phone I happened to be near. He was working at the architectural firm BRPH in Rockledge, again on projects for NASA. This particular morning was a school holiday, and I was at the pay phone in the K-Mart parking lot with Sean and Brendan at my side, seven and four years old by then. Usually, the receptionist transferred me to Michel's line right away.

This time, however, someone I didn't know answered. "Mrs. Couvreux, your husband seems to have had some sort of seizure, and his heart apparently stopped—'sudden death' they are calling it. But the paramedics are here and have reanimated him. He's in the ambulance on the way to the hospital right now."

I was dumbfounded. It took several minutes for this news to register in my brain, and even then, it didn't make sense. It wasn’t sinking in. Michel was only thirty-seven. How do you die of a heart attack at only thirty-seven years old? Was it a heart attack? "Sudden death?" What did that mean? It was surreal. This happened to other people I read about in the newspaper, not me.

It had been two years since we dropped anchor at Dragon Point and we were just getting back on our feet again. We had paid back my sister the $4,000 she loaned us for the new engine, and Michel was enjoying good health after fully recovering from his hernia surgery. We were putting some money aside and looked forward to sailing onward again soon. Now what? Was it over? Would we ever sail again? Would we lose Michel? I never thought I'd be a widow, let alone so young. I was at a complete loss, and my bearings were rattled. It's true what they say: Life can change in a matter of seconds.

The person on the other end of the line told me that one of Michel's colleagues was on his way to our boat to take me to the hospital. I raced back to the Shack and to the boat with Sean and Brendan in tow. Susan Martin saw me running down the road as I frantically headed out to meet whoever was coming to pick me up. She quickly called out that a black car was driving around looking for me. I very hastily told her the little I knew of what was going on. Then I ran into Bill Schaefer who was also running down the road, frantically searching for me to give me the news; I had no idea how he knew. The news was traveling fast.

Susan instantly took the kids, and the black car driven by Mike, one of Michel's colleagues, caught up with me. Speeding to the hospital, he gave me a brief synopsis. It seems Michel simply collapsed in the office while walking down the hallway. Someone immediately performed CPR, which saved his life. An ambulance on a training drill happened to be in the neighborhood and arrived on the scene within minutes. The paramedics dispensed a couple of shocks from the defibrillator paddles, and Michel was no longer dead to the world. But that didn’t solve the initial problem of what exactly happened and why.

I found Michel in the emergency room hooked up to all kinds of equipment. I was frightened, and he was frantic. Clipboards were thrust at me: sign this, sign that. He kept asking me over and over again, "What happened?" He didn’t remember that he had just asked me the same question minutes earlier. He didn’t understand where he was and had no memory of what happened. All he knew was that he was suddenly in an ambulance. I wanted to break down and cry but I couldn’t for his sake. I was just as confused as he was and terribly afraid of what would come next.

The months that followed were full of uncertainty and a lot of waiting. After a gamut of tests conducted in the hospital in Melbourne, it was determined that Michel had a very healthy heart. There didn't seem to be any disease, blockage, high blood pressure, or cholesterol. The doctors’ best guess was that Michel most likely had some sort of electrical impulse or arrhythmia problem, and to properly determine this, he should be transferred to a specialty unit in Lakeland, two hours away. There was an enormous amount of logistics involved with Michel being in Lakeland and my visiting him. I had to organize for the kids and school, and find a decent car for me to use since ours wasn't dependable. We could never have managed without the Martins and Schaefers. Susan and Patrick took care of Sean and Brendan and fed us. Bill and Josephine loaned me their car for my almost-daily, two-hour trek to Lakeland. Their solidarity and steadfast support got us through this.

Dr. Kevin Browne, the head of the electrophysiology unit at the Lakeland hospital concluded that Michel’s problem was something called ventricular fibrillation. He conducted test after test on Michel’s heart for the next month, determining the electrical impulse threshold where his heart would essentially just "snuff out." They would electrically incite his heart to beat at such a rapid pace that it couldn’t handle it anymore and just quit. Apparently, normal hearts can handle great speeds and Michel’s couldn’t. Dr. Browne’s final prognosis was that Michel could greatly benefit from an "implantable defibrillator." Today it’s a common item as small as a pacemaker, and most often combined with one. In 1987, however, it was still experimental and was a unit as big as a Walkman.

Dr. Browne couldn’t confirm that this device was the end-all solution for Michel, or even whether he may or may not die without it. Michel’s heart could have another episode, or it could never happen again. We could take our chances of having it implanted, or live without. Implantation involved being on a waiting list and eventual open-heart surgery, and all the discomfort and recovery such a major operation entailed. Now things were getting even more complicated, scary, and financially out of control. Our last resort was to go back to France to try to sort all this out, which we decided to do.

Through our French emergency medical travel insurance that we had at the time, a doctor and nurse from France were dispatched to us in Florida and acted in a "medevac" capacity for Michel. There were too many unknowns in Michel’s condition to allow him to travel solo, isolated from immediate access to medical assistance and a defibrillator. With no idea how long we would be in France, we hoped for a swift solution, since we couldn't afford to be gone for long.

We made it to France and Michel was eventually admitted to the cardiac unit at the main hospital in Bordeaux. Two long months of waiting followed. All our notions of solving things quickly vanished due to incessant delays. There were insurance details to work out, a battery of tests and confirmations to be run, negotiations and details with the defibrillator company to be worked out, and a waiting list for the procedure to contend with. The operation was scheduled and rescheduled several times. As in the States, this was a new and experimental cardiac procedure in France, and as it turned out, Michel was only the second person in France to undergo the operation. Our French doctors had never performed this procedure, and there was a lot of uncertainty on many levels. We got the distinct impression they were stalling.

Exasperated with the wait, we were on the verge of canceling the whole thing. I was beside myself that despite our having done our utmost to resolve this as quickly as possibly by coming to France for a solution, we were thwarted at every turn, running into one obstacle after another. Seriously depressed and extremely irritable, I was sick of confronting the long, worried, and concerned faces of family and friends all around me. Their eternal questions, well-meant encouragement, and unsolicited advice kept me on edge. But I still had to keep things on an even keel for the kids' sake. My mornings were spent doing schoolwork with Sean and Brendan, trying to maintain some semblance of a normal routine. As far as the boys were concerned, we were on vacation being in France with their grandparents. I imagine they detected our stress, but it's hard to know.

While we waited for the operation to take place, Michel was released from the hospital at one point, but he wasn't allowed out of my sight. I became his constant guardian and was entrusted with a portable defibrillator to save his life again, if necessary. I could not physically leave his side, a responsibility that made me uneasy. I didn't want his life—or death—to be solely in my hands. I was exhausted.

Finally, on June twenty-ninth, over three months since Michel's sudden death, the procedure was performed successfully. Only three weeks out of the hospital, we flew back to Florida. We were emotionally exhausted, physically wiped out, and in deep debt. Many of our friends and family thought us irresponsible by returning to the boat so quickly and impressed upon us that they thought we were reckless for even envisioning our continued sailing plans. But we were determined.

Although our spirit was dampened, it wasn't broken. We felt cut short at this point, and that we had been thwarted in fulfilling our goal of traveling as a family and educating our children through the discovery of other cultures and lands. Our dream was now stronger than ever, and Michel and I were united on this front.