My Twice-Lived Life A Memoir

Chapter 1 MY Unexpected Life I was in Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, Florida, far from my New Hampshire home, less than three months after my early retirement at sixty-two, when the nursesmale and femalehad given me their cheery bread-and-breakfast welcome to cardiac intensive care and hooked me up to tubes and wires. I experienced an unexpected comfort from the machines and felt my feet and hands, then legs and arms, then body and head relax. I was not anxious as I had been in the restaurant. I no longer felt foolish at asking my friend Chip Scanlan to take me on a careening drive across town to emergency. The nurses had called a doctor, someone from the business office had personally checked my insurance card even if it was Sunday night, and they had taken me seriously enough to admit me to cardiac intensive care. I knew I was where I belonged. Soon the monitors beeped insistent messages only the nurses could understand, and I was touched by their sudden concern as they circled me, anxiously looking down, each busy with a different task. Then I realized it wasn't caring that motivated them as much as challenge. The smiles became game faces, grim with football- field excitement. They shared an adrenaline high. This would be a "good" heart attackand as a former police reporter I knew what a "good" fire, accident, shooting meant: one that would test their craft. I imagined I could feel my father's ironic smile on my face and hoped he had known I had made it down to Boston from New Hampshire and was waiting outside emergency while he had had his last heart attack. Moments later the elephant stepped on my chestthe cliche is accurateand I knew why the nurses were excited. I was having a heart attack and it must have been a beaut. My first reaction, I confess, was satisfaction. I had been telling my primary-care doctor at home that something was wrong. He assured me he saw no signs of heart trouble. I was given a stress test by this doctor who called himself a heart specialist but, I later learned, had failed board certification many times, and he told me I didn't need a cardiologist and not to worry. I tried. My father had been a hypochondriac, and I had feared all my life that it was an inherited disease. Fear of his hypochondria was a main reason I played football, boxed, and volunteered for the paratroops. Now the machines proved I was not imagining my failing heart. I gloated. I could hardly wait to tell those doctors when I got home. Then the editor took over: if I got home. I turned my mind from the satisfaction that this was indeed a genuine, 100 percent heart attack to observe just what was going on. I was not surprised at my reporter's detachment. I had a lifetime of training in objective observation. It had served me well when I had to witness the suffering of others and to write their stories on deadline. Now I would see if that coldness of which I was both proud and ashamed could be turned on myself. A loudspeaker rasped out orders from a cardiologist who had seen me earlier and gone home. The nurses relayed numbers to him and followed orders, inserting needles in me, attaching more wires, feeding medication into tubes, and carrying on a terse dialogue that was similar to the radio messages that went from platoon to company or company to battalion when I was in combat. I appreciated the flat, unemotional manner in which they reported and the equally objective manner of his response. They were businesslike and that was what I wanted at the moment: professional carevery professional care. I focused on their application of technology and listened intently trying to read their medical jargon and find out how I was doing. My detachment from my own dying did not surprise me. It came from my nature, from experiencMurray, Donald M. is the author of 'My Twice-Lived Life A Memoir' with ISBN 9780345436900 and ISBN 0345436903.