they listened to my heart.
The diagnosis was always “heart murmur. Nothing to worry about. You’ll probably outgrow it.”
I didn’t outgrow it. Came time for me to leave college. It was 1968. Recall the unpleasantness in Vietnam that was raging at the time? The government was insistent I go and take a part. I had another physical.
“Oooooh,” said the doctor.
I didn’t have a heart murmur any more. The murmur, or strange sound emanating from my heart, turned out to be something else.
I was twenty-one. The diagnosis was aortic insufficiency. Doctors can spend hours explaining. I can do it much more quickly.
In the normal heart, the aortic valve—from which blood leaves the heart and goes out into the rest of the body—contains three leaflets, or cusps, which open when the blood is forced out and then close tightly together so that none of the blood can leak back inside the heart.
The doctor’s diagnosis was that I had been born with only TWO leaflets in my aortic valve. I was born in 1946, right after the Big War. Perhaps there was a shortage of aortic leaflets.
Regardless, each time my heart pumped blood out, some of the blood would seep back into my heart, causing the “murmur” sound. On the next beat, my heart would have to pump that much harder.
“It’s like taking three steps and then falling back two to make one,” the doctor explained.
I was frightened of course.
“You can forget the service,” said the doctor. “They’ll never let you in with an aortic insufficiency.”
I wasn’t frightened after he said that. Better an aortic insufficiency than a bullet from a Russian-made AK-47 right between my eyes, I figured.
The doctor made it quite clear to me. No big problem at the moment, he said. A young heart can withstand a great deal.
“But someday,” said the doctor, “someday, you will have to have that valve replaced.”
Someday. To a young man who has fallen in love in a motel utility room in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, who has practiced-kissed Phi Mu’s, and who has just been given a reprieve from the mud and blood of Vietnam, someday never comes.
2
I avoided any big deal concerning the malfunction with my heart for the next fourteen years. The fact I had been diagnosed as having this “aortic insufficiency” caused a problem here and there with life insurance rates, but other than that, it was nothing more than a slight nuisance in the back of my head. Something to worry about only if I didn’t have anything else better to worry about.
I took up tennis when I was twenty-three and quickly shed the fifty pounds I had gained eating my first wife’s cooking. I could play three sets of hard singles in the hot sun, drink a half-case of beer, and still manage to dance an evening away, even if somebody else usually had to drive me home.
Symptoms of a problem with my heart? What symptoms? Someday, the doctor had said . . .
“Quit shaking the bed,” my third wife said to me one night. It was late January 1982.
“I’m not shaking the bed,” I answered.
“You’re shaking it,” she insisted.
“Go to sleep,” I said.
“How can I sleep with the bed shaking like this?” my wife demanded.
The bed was shaking. I looked under the bed. There used to be things that slept under my bed when I was a kid. Godzilla. Zombies.
There was nothing under my bed but the banana sandwich I hadn’t finished the night before. Godzilla wouldn’t eat a day-old, half-eaten banana sandwich.
“I think it’s your heartbeat,” my wife said. “Your heart is beating so hard, it’s shaking the bed.”
That’s nonsense. There I was, lying quietly in my bed. How could my heart be beating hard enough to shake the bed?
“You had better go to the doctor and get that checked,” my wife said.
I had learned to all but avoid doctors since I was twenty-one. I had gone in for a few routine physicals, but there had been no new developments regarding the fact my aortic valve leaked.
Someday . . .
“Do you really think it’s my heartbeat that is shaking the bed?” I asked my wife again.
“I don’t remember installing a Magic Fingers system in the mattress,” she said. “Go to the doctor.”
I made an appointment at 3 PM with my doctor. I also made a date for a tennis match at 5 PM.
I packed my tennis gear in the back of my car. Two racquets. After you have played tennis for at least ten years, you can carry around two racquets. I drove away from my house, headed for my doctor’s office. My greatest concern was whether I’d be able to get in and out of the doctor’s office in time to make my five o’clock tennis match. Women. Sometimes you have to humor them.
I knew something was wrong when my doctor’s nurse complimented me on the shirt I was wearing soon after I had been given a chest X-ray.
“Hey,” she said, “that’s a sharp shirt you’re wearing.”
The shirt wasn’t sharp at all. It was an ugly, green shirt I had won in a tennis tournament. Actually, I hadn’t won the shirt at all. They gave everybody who played in the tournament a shirt and all the reds and blues were gone when I went to pick out my shirt.
“I really enjoyed your last book,” the nurse continued.
How long did I have, I wondered? Six months tops? They’re never this nice to you in a doctor’s office unless they know something you don’t.
My doctor is a quiet man. He’s never ruffled.
“OH, MY GOD!” I heard him scream from the X-ray room.
I said a prayer. Lord, I said, don’t make me suffer for long.
My doctor came back into the room where I was waiting in my ugly, green shirt.
“Hey,” he said, “that’s a sharp shirt you’re wearing.”
“Give it to me straight doc,” I demanded.
“Come with me,” he said.
My heart was pounding hard enough to shake an entire Holiday Inn.
He put two X-rays up on the screen. One was the X-ray that had been taken of my heart two years previous. The other was an X-ray that had been taken of my heart in the previous twenty minutes.
“This is your
