The Joy Menu #52: Check
There is quite a bit of comfort in a treatable, conquerable ailment in the middle of an insurmountable one.
Dear Creators,
My father’s father — my grandfather Jack — died of heart disease when I was 13. My father was 45 at the time. He flew to Belgium for the very end, and when he returned he was in a cloud of grief and sadness for months. It was so unprecedented, and lasted so long, I remember asking my mother if this was how he would be from now on. Would he ever be “the old way” again?
Jack’s heart had been failing for a while, and so my father began to organize his life around keeping his own heart healthy. Hence the diets; hence those long, long walks. And so there was some irony, and frustration, when after twenty years of the right routines, the right care, months after his terminal cancer diagnosis, my father felt a stiffness and took himself to the ER and discovered that he was, indeed, having that long-feared heart attack.
It was late April. Las Vegas was beginning to warm, but still expressed the gentle consideration of a few cool mornings a week. That day, if I remember correctly (and who knows if I do) I’d pulled into the parking structure at work, stood to stretch in the still-cool air, and begun to make my way up the concrete stairs for a few hours of Friday meetings, when my mother texted, and then called. I went straight to my manager and explained, pulled back out of the parking structure, and drove to California.
“My father — yes, the same father with cancer — is having a heart attack.”
I’d been doing the drive every weekend anyway; usually I waited until my meetings were finished, listening to the words of work with less investment than my colleague’s service dog, who lay with his belly exposed while we shared our “personal weather systems” and updated each other on the vague challenges of the week. That day, to miss the meeting was as much a relief as when a teacher tells you you can “turn the homework in on Monday” though you’ve already finished it — hastily, that morning over breakfast.
By the time I got to my father’s bedside four and a half hours later, he was chipper and relaxed, telling the story of the “Wall of Stents” in the doctor’s office (one of every size, like a gallery of kink), and waiting for the Cardiac Nurse to come by for a chat.
We were in the same hospital wing where he’d spent so much time four months before, though we no longer had the corner room; no longer felt interminably stuck waiting for the worst news of our lives; no longer felt a giddy fascination at the spread of palatable entrées available on the hospital menu.
On the recording I made, when the nurse does come, we ask her — casually, almost — why they were unable to see this coming when they’d scanned and graphed and echoed every inch of his body the January before when they’d done the initial diagnostic tests and exploratory surgery.
Her voice is patient and kind. She explains, matter-of-factly, that those scans would only have discovered previous damage from heart-attacks of the past. While this was, in fact, a new one — and almost certainly his first.
We make light of the news. We laugh. The nurse mentions discharge. We look at scans and I am impressively versed in the dates and times of which were taken when.
“So they did the CT and didn’t see an occlusion, then they did the MRI?” “Yes, on the seventh, then two days later…” “I see; look here: your echo, read by Dr. Kim, shows high blood pressure but no diastolic function, left ventricle and valves are normal...” “Though it wouldn’t have shown us anything…” “No, we’d need more diagnostics for heart disease; they’ll do another echo before you leave, and the ultrasound...” “Oh, they did that already…” “I see, they just haven’t read it…”
Calmly. Casually. Like we’re all nurses and she’s just a colleague.
There is quite a bit of comfort in a treatable, conquerable ailment in the middle of an insurmountable one.
At home, my father returns to his routine. In a day, he’s back to himself.
Actually, he’s better than himself, as if surviving a heart attack has made him more energized, more embodied, more determined to survive the cancer as well.
We go for walks. I record more stories. We eat pita with his friends outside and he tells the story and everyone laughs — he with his best chesty, wheezy laugh.
Trust your body, love your body, doubt your body, ignore your body —do what you will, but it is undeniably a miraculous machine.
It’s spring. The sun shines. The air is crisp and light. He’s survived a heart-attack with terminal cancer.
Until the very end, the very bitter end, my father’s heart stayed strong.
Even on that last day, while we stood around his bed, holding him, feeling his energy reverberate between this place and that other; as his body heaved and the breaths which were to be his last were held in and flung out, intensely, quickly, deeply — his heart stayed strong.
Bullish. Efficient. Stubborn.
I imagine it like a king in a game of chess:
Move…
— Check, wait.
Move…
— Check, wait.
Move…
— Check mate.
It had to kneel in resignation; it had to be lain on its side.
Onward to creative joy,
Joey
