An Arrow Through the Heart: One Woman's Story of Life, Love, and Surviving a Near-Fatal Heart Attack
300
An Arrow Through the Heart: One Woman's Story of Life, Love, and Surviving a Near-Fatal Heart Attack
300eBook
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Overview
This groundbreaking memoir was first mentioned on Oprah Winfrey’s life-saving 2002 show announcing cardiovascular disease as a leading cause of death among young women. That tragic fact is still true. With both depth and humor, Deborah Daw Heffernan recounts her first year of recovery from the massive heart attack that ambushed her in a gentle yoga class—during the prime of her life and despite her impeccable health history.
Ranging from high-stakes action in the OR at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to quietly unfolding seasons on a lake in Maine, An Arrow Through the Heart is a moving and informative story of what it takes to find one’s own path to true healing. Ultimately, Heffernan combines allopathic and complementary medicine to create a sensible recovery strategy for our times. She touchingly describes her husband’s devotion and the toll that her cardiovascular disease takes on him, as well as how he, too, grew from the experience. Weaving their story with the lives of family and friends, Heffernan demonstrates how illness can be transformative for all involved.
Not only an empowering companion for cardiac patients, this medical classic is a guide to recovery from catastrophic change of any kind. Above all, it is a powerful testament to the unexpected joy that can come from leading a life of acknowledged impermanence. Updates include cardiovascular data for today’s reader, links to the author’s website and other resources, a new section on SCAD (spontaneous coronary artery dissection), and— spoiler alert—a heart transplant in 2006. All author’s proceeds are donated to cardiac causes.
Deborah Daw Heffernan is a graduate of Georgetown and Harvard Universities. She has worked as a teacher in Switzerland, an associate dean at Boston University, and a freelance writer. For fourteen years she was vice president of a leading Boston-based corporate training/consulting firm—until a near-fatal heart attack changed her life forever. She lives with her husband, Jack, on a small lake in Maine.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504009195 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 02/24/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 300 |
| File size: | 384 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
An Arrow Through The Heart
One Woman's Story of Life, Love, and Surviving a Near-Fatal Heart Attack
By Deborah Daw Heffernan
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2002 Deborah Daw HeffernanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0919-5
CHAPTER 1
SPRING
1
There is a weight on my chest. Right between my breasts, pressing on my breastbone—as though the atmosphere ripped open a shaft from the heavens to me and the sky poured down onto this one spot. Observant, detached, slowing down, breathing carefully, I think with my body.
"I am having a heart attack," I say to Zoe, my yoga teacher.
I am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lying on my back on Zoe's clean, polished floor looking at white walls and gleaming wooden window frames. The pressure on my chest has become very specific. It is bearing down now and revolving like a vise, cranking my chest tighter and tighter. I feel no pain, just curiosity. It is the alert, still curiosity of an animal at the sound of a footfall in the woods, of a child beckoned by a frightening stranger, of a bird that senses a change in the atmosphere before a storm hits. The pressure, the twisting continues. It is not going away. I am beginning to sweat.
Zoe is bending over me because she's been helping me improve a gentle yoga pose, Reclining Maricyasana. The idea, she says, is that with the shoulders relaxed and arms outstretched receptively, the heart is released and can ascend to radiance. It is one of yoga's warming poses.
But I am cold. I look at my hands. They are marble white. I sluggishly realize that Zoe has helped me sit up; I suddenly feel her small, strong hand supporting my back. Now I have the sensation of cold rivulets coursing down my arms, millions of discrete trickles running from my shoulders, over my elbows, to my wrists. Nausea rises.
"I am having a heart attack," I say again, this time with the calm, clinical finality that comes from absolute knowledge deep within my body.
For only a moment, my mind protests. Give it a minute. It must be a muscle pull. But Zoe does not second-guess me. Instead, she trusts the voice of my body and asks me what I want her to do.
"I want you to call 911. Tell them I need a cardiac team. Tell them to take me to Mount Auburn Hospital. My doctor is Barbara Spivak. I need a cardiologist waiting for me. Something is terribly wrong."
The icy rivers flow to my marble hands. Take charge, take charge, take charge.
The 911 guys lumber in with armfuls of equipment—thundering male steps echoing into a serene white room with three women in tights sprawled on a polished floor. Quickly assessing what is needed, they joke that when they got the call they thought "yoga class" was code for a cult. I laugh. Everything is fine if I can laugh. They would be stern if something were wrong. I am aware of how big they are, how slender my classmates. I am amused by the space men take up and reminded of my husband in the bathroom, obliviously standing in front of the mirror I was using while happily telling me a funny story about his trip to the dump. I like these guys.
They hook me up to machines. They put a tiny pill under my tongue. They ask me how I feel. Not great yet, but better because they are here, though it's harder to look inside my body when they distract me with light bantering. I am feeling happy in this moment. It must be a muscle pull.
I laugh with them and ask, "So, what do you guys think?"
"We think you're a very lucky lady."
Whew. Take two aspirin ...
But the biggest one is all business now. He finishes his response gently, firmly.
"You're coming with us to the hospital."
They strap me into a chair and will not let me move by myself. I think they are cute and want to show off how strong they are. I feel cold terror suffuse my body, taking over as the tingling trickles flowing down my arms retreat. Or am I too scared to feel them?
Two men carry me out the door backwards. It is the summer view I had as a girl riding the tailgate of Dad's woody station wagon, the same view I had as a young woman teaching in the Swiss Alps, nauseated from sitting backwards on a train and vowing never to do that again. As they load me into the van, I wave to a child and an old man, reassuring them that everything will be all right. Zoe's face is small and serious on the steps. I thank her and wonder at my self-possession. But I am simply here, in the arms of these funny strong men. Surrendering my independence, I feel a rush of relaxation.
Or am I deciding that I am relaxed when what is actually happening is that my body is failing me? What does that feel like? How would I know?
The men in the front seat are calling in to the hospital. I strain to hear what is said, muffled code words through glass. The big guy is still with me, administering more tests, asking me over and over how I feel. I no longer know. I desperately want to tell him that every test makes me feel better, but it does not, no matter how hard I try to please him. He shows no elation or disappointment. I can't read him. How am I?
I was dying of a massive heart attack, or myocardial infarction (MI). Between my first sensation of pressure and the rescue team's arrival, only ten minutes went by. Those ten minutes—an eternity—saved my life. I relive every second again and again. I think of all the places I could have been instead of within the serene walls of a yoga studio.
I was your typical harried workingwoman, a partner in a small but prominent corporate training company. May 12 had been a Monday like any other—better than most because there was no packed suitcase behind my office door ready to be loaded into the four o'clock cab to Logan Airport, flung into another rental car in the evening darkness, and unzipped in another hotel in another strange city of blinking lights, with highways lacing it like a sneaker. As it happened, a client had called on Friday and switched our meeting to a phone conference later in the week. So on this Monday, instead of flying to Detroit, I was going to my yoga class and sleeping in my own bed next to my husband, the love of my life.
What if, bored and imprisoned in an airline seat a few months before, I hadn't picked up the in-flight copy of Fortune and read an article on heart attacks that described many of the symptoms I would experience? What if my Detroit client had not changed our meeting to a phone conference? What if I'd taken that one last call and been sitting in rush-hour traffic instead of in my yoga class focusing on my breathing, deeply attuned to my body?
What if I had reacted to my body's signals with denial and hubris? What if I had not acknowledged death in the moment it visited me?
I would be dead. And if I had died, I would not be here. I would not be looking up the lake at another spring, one year later, from my study in our old house in Maine. I would not be seeing our beloved Mount Washington across the border in New Hampshire, with snow lingering in Tuckerman Ravine like icing on the cake saved for last. I would not be listening to water lapping at the peninsula—each year an exciting new sound after the silence of ice stretched shore to shore during Maine's long winter. I would not be hearing the wind chimes on the northwest corner of the house heralding several days of blue skies and sparkling water. I would not hear the loons or the mourning doves or the tree swallows busily nesting in the fantasy birdhouse, made by friends for our wedding, with a brass heart for a weathervane.
Every day I am aware of my good fortune and regard each moment of life as the exquisite miracle that it is. I am also aware that before IT happened, I had lived each day as best I could—often too intensely, but always fully participating in life. As I write that, I pause. True? I will always wonder what I could have done differently. Did I appreciate life enough? Could I have prevented IT from happening?
With time, I am learning that the physical why is not important. That ride across Cambridge in the rescue vehicle with my burly boyfriends was the beginning of my journey of the heart in both the physical and spiritual sense, because I believe that to heal the body you must heal the spirit. With time, I have been able to see my catastrophic heart attack as the gift that it was.
2
In the emergency room I am a magic trick, a rabbit who suddenly appears from under a hat as they lift me out of my chair and onto a bed in a room filled with beds. I do not remember entering the hospital with the 911 guys.
"I can do this," I tell them cheerfully, and assert life itself by rolling onto the bed unassisted, sort of. I hope they can see that I am fine if I can move like that. I was in my yoga class, after all.
Someone removes my sneakers. How did they get on my feet? I was barefoot in class. An elderly lady wearing a faded hospital johnny stares at me from the bed opposite mine. She looks scared, poor thing. It doesn't occur to me that she is staring in horror at the state I'm in. So I give her an encouraging smile as they crisply pull the curtains around me, the metal rings screeching along the ceiling rod like a car braking before a crash. My big boyfriends disappear and I feel like a lost child. No one is teasing me here. They hook me up to a heart monitor and I realize that something is seriously wrong, that I am in real danger.
Snow is beginning to cover me—softly, gently. I love the snow; it does not frighten me. I am deeply centered and practical.
"Please call my husband. Now. Jack Heffernan. Genzyme meeting at the Algonquin Club. Tall, silver-haired, handsome." I see his smile floating in the air like the Cheshire Cat's.
The busy people in green do not acknowledge me. They are all over my body, and I can tell my voice is not their priority—a new and disconcerting experience for someone who has worked for fourteen years as a consultant and whose advice is sought. I repeat my request, unsure whether I am actually speaking out loud. A doctor with a full beard looks up from the machine.
"You are our first priority, Mrs. Heffernan."
But I am steely; he has met his match. And I am remarkably lucid, still managing the situation as if I had spent my whole life preparing for it.
"Thank you. I know you are doing your job, Doctor, but not everyone in this room is attending to me. Someone must call my husband now." Thinking that as medical people they would be concerned about danger to him, too, I add, "Jack is a mountain climber and has been through a lot in his life. He's in biotechnology and understands medicine. He'll stay calm. Please call him."
Jack is bending over me. Such a lovely sight, such a handsome man. His brown eyes look concerned, but I choose to look at his smile, smooth pink lips stretched broadly over his strong white teeth. He is all dressed up in one of his corporate outfits, but I know that he pees in the pine needles the minute we arrive in western Maine every Friday night, where an old gray house sits waiting for us on a small lake. Jack is my love and he is bending over me. I smile back. But just as I open my heart to him, a knife slams into it—then nothing.
I have been to Nothing. It is a place. I remember it.
Jack jerks back the curtain and motions to the doctor as I fall back, my hands reaching for my chest. The doctor checks my heart readings and swiftly pulls the curtain around me again.
"Mr. Heffernan, we have to ask you to step outside."
People in green slip into my tent like raiding Bedouins. Jack, his eyes pleading, touches my hand to steady himself and then retreats behind the pastel curtain, now as impenetrable as a prison wall. We've always believed that we are the lovers Plato imagined: originally one person, the two parts having been separated and desiring to be joined again, no matter what. After all it took to find each other, we are being torn apart once more, and Jack is alone just when he needs me the most—seeing over and over again my hands flying to my chest, my face turning white, my gaze looking inward and away from him as I head for another world.
It took only a second for me to go.
We first met in a conference room much like the one Jack just left. He had invited my training company to Stamford, Connecticut, to present our services at GTE Corporation (now Verizon) headquarters, where he was the vice president of corporate human resources. After almost ten hard years helping to build our company from one typewriter to twenty-five people, I was thrilled to be at GTE and trying my best not to show it. But crawling under the table to plug in an overhead projector, I hit my head with a loud thump and tore my dark stockings. I tried to hide the ribbon of white running crazily down my leg by walking sideways like a crab from the screen to my notes. My foolishness was confirmed by the wide grin on Jack's face. In spite of my rattled presentation, GTE sent us to work at various sites around the country. A year later I offered to take Jack to lunch as a thank-you gesture. Somehow the lunch was changed to dinner. I brought a briefcase containing my next sales pitch. Five hours later the briefcase remained untouched, and we hadn't even noticed the waiters piling chairs on the tables around us. Usually ravenous, I hadn't eaten a bite.
As in all adult courtships, we brought with us our histories. Jack's included a divorce and five children ranging in age from mid-teens to late twenties. Wisely, he "forgot" to mention the kids until our fourth date, by which time he could tell I really liked him. He told me carefully over dinner in my rent-controlled Cambridge apartment, and like any self-respecting woman, I promptly threw him out for misrepresenting the situation. At the bottom of the stained linoleum stairs with metal treads, in the flamingo-pink foyer with a gaping hole punched through the plaster, he tripped over my "car"—a beat-up, brown, three-speed Raleigh bicycle. Jack vowed never to talk to me again.
My history, on the other hand, included feeding one too many meals to men who were passing through before marrying someone else. It came to a head in the mid-1980s, when a speeding black BMW with a so-called "eligible young bachelor" at the wheel nearly flattened me and my Raleigh. I took it as a sign that maybe marriage was not going to be my fate; the man I wanted, who had both a career and a conscience, did not exist. I decided that I was content on my own and happy to listen to National Public Radio while putting up sauce with tomatoes from the Haymarket. Besides, friends were always eager to eat at my table; though I was single, I never felt alone. It was a good life. A divorced man with five kids was not what I needed. I was sick of taking care of other people's kids. I wanted my own.
But Jack's goodness haunted me. Watching him march down my linoleum stairs, rigid and wounded, I knew he'd be back and would never leave.
After a whirlwind courtship that felt short to everyone but us, we became engaged during a December whiteout on Mount Washington and were married one year after that restaurant meal I never touched. He was fifty and I was about to turn thirty-seven. When I told my father that I loved Jack Heffernan, five children and all, he looked at me as though I'd just told him I had breast cancer, and then begged me to quietly elope rather than embarrass him with a wedding. But his habit of supporting me prevailed. There is a photograph of Dad grinning happily at our reception, jacket off and tie askew after dancing all night with as many women as possible. But even as he came to love Jack, and believe in Jack's love for me, Dad would always be wary and ready to rescue me in the big old woody station wagon he still owned, in case any of us needed to move again. And my four sisters and brother followed suit, never getting too close, never really trusting that a man could love a Daw girl like our father always would.
Jack's children chose not to attend the wedding. I couldn't blame them. Being young adults did not make it any easier for them to sort out their feelings following their parents' divorce. Knowing many couples in second marriages, I have concluded that there is never a good time for a divorce and remarriage. No matter how civil or mutually consensual the divorce is, no matter how many years the marriage has been over, nor how relieved both parents and even children may feel, divorce rocks kids of any age because we always yearn for the perfect happiness we think other families enjoy.
Jack quit his job in Connecticut and moved into my three-room apartment. He didn't bring much with him. I cleared out a file drawer for his socks, shirts, and underwear. His few suits fit nicely in my armoire and we piled our sweaters together in my tiny closet.
With amusement, Jack discovered my peculiar relationship to technology. I could never find a flashlight with working batteries when I needed it, plus I had heard that batteries would keep well at low temperatures. Solution: Keep a loaded flashlight in the freezer! He found it when reaching for an ice cube tray.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Arrow Through The Heart by Deborah Daw Heffernan. Copyright © 2002 Deborah Daw Heffernan. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,Spring,
Summer,
Autumn,
Winter,
Second Spring,
Epilogue,
Women's Heart Attack Symptoms,
Are You a SCAD Survivor?,
A Plea for Organ Donation,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Interviews
Exclusive Author Essay
Heart disease kills one out of every two women, yet only 50 to 70 percent of those fatalities can be attributed to known factors like obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, and so on. I had none of the predictive factors and thought I was safe. Wrong. Almost dead wrong. Like many women, my first sign of heart disease was a heart attack.
My most important lesson from the year I spent recuperating on a lake in western Maine is that you simply cannot separate matters of the heart from the muscle. Writing this book helped me explore those matters -- privately, slowly, building careful, honest sentences as I built up my body to live in this world again. And in the end, although I had written An Arrow Through the Heart to warn other women and save their lives, in the process I saved my own.
I should have anticipated the power of committing thoughts to paper. I should have known that the search for just the right word can unearth truths. In perfecting a sentence that eluded grace, I discovered that my thinking was foggy, that my feelings were not clear yet, often demanding that I return to bed and stare at the ceiling, even sleep, before the truth finally emerged. Sometimes it took days or even months, appearing like skywriting when I least expected it -- in the shower, chopping onions, brushing my teeth.
I should have anticipated this miraculous process because I taught it once in an international boarding school in the Swiss Alps, armed with no other qualifications than a recent college degree and the fact that I was there, scrubbing pots in the kitchen, when the real English teacher resigned. It was a hippy school, with lovely notions of world peace based on educating children of different nations together. But I had no idea what to do with a handful of teenagers of different ages, races, cultures, and abilities whose only commonality was English as their first language. They were a troubled, sullen lot, pawns in international divorces, and I was failing miserably to inspire them, especially Obi, black as the Nigerian night. He was gorgeous, privileged, and the laziest kid I've ever met.
One day in a frustrated fit, I stormed out of the classroom and into the first snow of the season, ordering my charges to follow. We made our way to a boulder at the edge of a field behind the school. Suddenly obedient, they one by one handed their notebooks to me, climbed the boulder, and jumped into the fresh snow. Then I handed their notebooks back and, without brushing any of the snow off, they wrote one sentence about how it felt.
Obi was last. This was the first snow he had ever seen, but he was too cool to admit it. Off he leapt, terror and elation fighting in his face. And then there was the beauty of ebony skin on pure white snow. And his laughter. His incredulity. The tall body emerging from the snow as from a bubble bath, and racing for his notebook. He wrote, "The snow is cold."
And we went from there until, days later, he had pushed and pushed himself to write a sentence that unlocked one feeling, a sentence so beautiful it made me cry and the other kids applaud. I wish I could remember it.
Over that year of miserable adolescence, as those kids wrote their sentences, slowly building them into paragraphs and then whole stories packed with meaning and truth, they found their voices. And so it was with me after my heart attack. Sentence by sentence I put myself back together again. Words saved my life. And perhaps by reading my book, you will save yours or the life of someone you love. (Deborah Daw Heffernan)