Hey, gang.
Welcome to today!
Finally! We’ve arrived at single digits. Small potatoes to some, maybe, but the march toward the goal is somehow more gratifying than reaching the goal itself. Maybe Homer was right; the journey really is the thing.
As for today, I wanted to share something with you. Yeah, we do a fair amount of sharing here together, but I guess this is a little different
So, aside from telling some personal stories in recent weeks, I try hard not to make our time together about me. (If I’ve failed in that along the way, please accept my sincere apologies. The way I see it, I’m just meant to be your resident scribe, nothing more.)
As for the picture, and as for those of you who know me well/even know me at all, I promise what you see there is a prelude to a happy ending.
Thanks in part to my dad, from the time I was about twelve years old, I’ve been a runner. And even though I imagine there are times when I look a whole lot more like a suitcase with legs vs. anything resembling a real runner, the fact is that I’ve been at it nearly 50 years.
You’ll laugh, but I do a little bit of everything when I run – sing familiar tunes to myself, make up characters for stories and even work through things that I know I’ll eventually have to try to manage. But never once while running, did I feel so breathless that I thought I might pass out. Never so exhausted that I couldn’t take another step. So disoriented that I was all but convinced that I might crack my head open on the pavement.
That was until this past Thanksgiving Day.
Thursday, November 28th
It seems like half the towns in America – probably more than that, actually – have races called “turkey trots.” Those are usually 5Ks and 10Ks (three+ and six+-mile races, respectively). and I’ve done a ton of them. In fact, I’ve missed just one over the last 35 years. And that was to go away on a honeymoon with my wife, Amy. Even during Covid, I managed to do a race, with my three girls mapping out a course for me and providing both water and encouragement along the way.
So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I was out there two Thursdays ago, running as fast as my sexagenarian legs would carry me. Sure, there was a time when I could push the envelope pretty hard, work through the general discomfort and good ‘ol lactic acid build up and kick to the finish. But like a wise man once said, “That was then.”
With about a half-mile to go, I was feeling every hour of my age, every step getting more and difficult.
You know, a dear friend of mine (my best friend, in fact) once gave me perhaps the greatest compliment of my life. He compared me to Dan Ruettiger, a walk-on football player at the University of Notre Dame.
“Rudy,” (Ruettiger’s longtime nickname and the title of a 1993 biopic starring Sean Astin) a consummate overachiever with a dogged determination and strength well beyond the expected limits of his 5’6”, 165 lb. frame, was an inspiration for a lot of people. So, that comparison was the ultimate flattery for me.
Now don’t get me wrong, while I certainly wouldn’t have minded being blessed with blinding speed and top-notch hand/eye skills back in the day, I swear I still wouldn’t trade.
So, knowing that, you can imagine that I wasn’t likely to coast into the finish with less than a half-mile to go.
And it was only when I was sitting – or should I say lying – on the ground just a few minutes later that I realized that my inner Dan Ruettiger was trying to tell me something.
I never lost consciousness, but later, my younger daughter, Sam, would tell me that I was completely ashen and absolutely freezing cold.
So, before I knew it, an ambulance showed up, and they started working on me. Typical stubborn asshole that I can be sometimes, I didn’t have much interest in going to the hospital. One of the EMT’s, a calm and caring man who actually came by to visit me later that day, gently talked me into going. Lucky for me.
As soon as I checked in, they ran a ton of tests, likely comparing them to the numbers they’d recorded back at the race site. I generally felt OK and did my best to keep the ER crew laughing, but I was worried. I mean, jesus, what was I doing there?
Fast forward to a visit from an ER doc, a woman who looked young enough to be my daughter, explaining that I needed to be admitted. I usually get an A in decorum, but before I could catch myself, I barked out a deleted expletive, realizing that I’d soon be eating turkey with the fixins out of Tupperware.
The young doc told me that most of my numbers were good, but that they just couldn’t let me go yet. I still felt generally OK, but by the time they moved me into my own room, I was more than shook up. That’s not quite true; I was petrified.
After a while, my girls came back to see me. (I had insisted that they go home after they moved me upstairs, as the family gathering back at our house included 19 people in toto. Yeah, it was an interesting day for sure.)
A little more time went by, and after a few clowning-around pics, like the one you see here, the girls brought me some food, and we had Thanksgiving dinner.
A few hours later, a nurse came in to explain to me that I’d be staying overnight. Yeah, a little more anger, a little more disbelief and a whole lot more fear.
Friday, November 29th
The clock on the wall read 4:25 am when they came in to check my vitals. (No biggie, I guess. I wasn’t exactly sleeping soundly.) I did go back to sleep for a short while, but it didn’t last.
A few hours later, two cardiologists – one of them the attending physician – came by to talk with me. Two respected docs, one simple message: “Well, Mr. Fischer, looks like you had a heart attack.”
It’s cliché, I guess/robbed from many a comedic moment in a sit-com even, but those words just hung in the air for a while. My first impulse was to cry, but I didn’t. Instead, I just sat there for a moment. This is a joke, right?
Next up was an echocardiogram (or an “echo” for short), eventually followed by a catheterization where they basically look at your heart to determine if your ticker is ticking properly.
They don’t put you out, per se. You’re in what’s known as twilight, when you don’t feel any pain or discomfort, but you’re more or less awake.
And then…(and, yes I’m paraphrasing), I heard the following: “…There’s nothing wrong with this guy…”
You’ll laugh, but because the two doctors had basically convinced me that I was in deep shit, that’s the last thing I expected to hear. (I swear when I first heard the crew talking, the crew of six different people who prepped and readied me and then looked right at my heart, I thought they were talking about somebody else. They can’t be talking about me.)
Shortly after, one of the cardiologists came in, almost laughing at himself for his potential misdiagnosis. He explained to me that everything had to be ruled out because of the way I was presenting. That one number that kept going up, a number that suggested I’d done some damage, returned to normal.
If I hadn’t been a bit doped up from the twilight and still in shock from the events leading up to that moment, I might have tried to stand up and bear hug the guy. We settled for a handshake, though, and I walked out the door about three hours later.
First and foremost, if you’ve read down this far, thank you for indulging me. It’s surely one of the weirdest few days I’ve ever experienced, with that happy ending payoff I alluded to earlier.
The postscript to all this is I dodged a bullet – a big one – and now just two weeks later, my doc has encouraged me to go back to my routine. Yeah, I’ll have to stop pretending that I’m 35 years old, I suppose, but in terms of second chances, I’m pretty sure I just got mine.
So for today anyway, let’s say that the nines most decidedly have it: The nine on the house number along the race course where I nearly fell to the ground, nine for my best imitation of Fritz the cat and his nine lives, nine for skirting the nearly unthinkable and lastly, how about the number itself. Yeah, apparently nine is largely recognized as the metaphorical representation of the heart, for compassion, love, humanitarianism and a deep connection to others.
Like my old grandfather used to say, “Walk out of the hospital in one piece, and you’ll be walking on air.”
Amen to that, Pop.
See you all tomorrow.
JFish
@Copyright 2024 by John L. Fischer