In preparing to sell my home of thirty years, my real estate agent advised me to update it. More than just a touch up, it was more of a modest remodel that took considerable effort and expense. It was worth it; the house sold within one day of being listed, but this is not the remodel I’m writing about. It’s about the remodel of my heart.
I’ve had cardiac issues since I was twenty-eight years old, when I awakened from a nightmare about the death of my five-year old daughter. I found myself in atrial fibrillation. My daughter had not died, but in the dream my heart felt broken, and indeed it was. Thus began a fifty-year episode of heart remodeling.
The human heart is workhorse, beating literally billions of times in a lifetime. Normally we don’t pay much attention to our hearts, unless as was true in my case, issues arise. I’ve always been able to feel my heart beating, and also when those beats are irregular. The arrhythmias became so frequent that by my early thirties I had an angiogram performed to find out if my arteries were getting clogged. They were not, but I did show evidence of mild cardiomyopathy, changes in the composition of my heart muscle.
I learned to live with occasional irregularities in my heart rhythm, but in my late forties, those arrhythmias become problematic. Additional angiogram’s found that some arteries were becoming blocked. Angioplasty and a stent bought me more time. The recommendation was that I have an ICD implanted in my chest. I’m now on my fourth generation of ICD, an implanted heart defibrillator that also functions as a pacemaker.
My first heart remodel was not just medical but metaphysical. My Buddhist practice inclined me to use a metaphor; if my heart was hardening, then I would undertake the task of softening it. Doing so became not just a medical, but a spiritual practice that goes on to this day.
When I had my fourth battery-powered ICD implanted early last year, an additional wire was connected to my ventricles so they would beat in better synchrony, thereby improving my heart function which had slipped low enough to qualify as heart failure. My heart would “remodel” I was told, in response, and so it has. My heart function has improved, but my most recent echocardiogram indicates that, paradoxically, my left atrium has enlarged. So the next chapter begins.
We all live on borrowed time, along with the matter we’re made of and have borrowed from the universe. Everything must be returned, and will be, right down to the very last subatomic particle. As to when that happens? I’m working on that.
My mother lived to eighty-nine and my father to ninety-one, but that generation was tough as nails. I don’t expect to last that long. They grew up without exposure to as many chemicals, pesticides, and food additives as my generation has, ate wisely and consumed no junk food. Yet as healthy as they were, they didn’t get out alive. Nobody does.
My current remodel project is based on gratitude and comfort for my heart’s 78 years of effort. It’s been a tough year – the loss of my wife of fifty years and selling the home we lived in for thirty. It’s been heartbreaking. But if a heart can break, it can also be repaired. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.
