I’d Like to Tell You About The Time Last Month When I Didn’t Die
A public service announcement from 'The Storm Skiing Journal'
Teton Village, Dec. 16: I wake up after midnight still full from dinner. Like I’ve swallowed a brick. In sweatpants and a ski coat I drive my rented Toyota to Jackson. Seven degrees outside. Google identifies two 24-hour pharmacies in Jackson but the only things open in Jackson, Wyoming at 2 o’clock in the morning are the Loaf ‘N Jug and Maverik Adventures First Stop. Both are gas stations and neither has what I need. I pound a C4 back at the condo. The caffeine moves things. A little.
But something is wrong. I don’t ski the next day even though I’m a five-minute walk from America’s greatest ski lift. My wife and I binge Suits all day instead. For the rest of the trip I barely eat. Back in New York, I weigh myself and I’ve lost 10 pounds.
Something is wrong. We are supposed to drive to Michigan for Christmas but all day I watch nature shows and apocalypse movies. I want to write or organize the house or read a book but all I can do is this and I never do this. Round trips to the bathroom all day long.
Something is wrong. I spend Dec. 23 in the insane asylum that is the NYU emergency room. Everyone is either 109 years old or lodged in a drug-induced purgatory. A CAT scan finds no blockage so a doctor sends me home with orders to follow up with a gastroenterologist.
I make an appointment for Jan. 10. The less I eat, the better I feel, so I eat sparingly. We fly to Cayman for New Year’s. On Jan. 5 I ski 23,240 vertical feet at Copper Mountain. Up beyond 12,000 feet, a pressure like a dropped anvil on my chest. I pause every 10 or 12 turns. Heaving. Gulping air. Five minutes each time to catch my breath.
Something is wrong. Or maybe not. I live at sea level. Usually altitude doesn’t bother me but sometimes it does. Vail 2008. Aspen 2015. Nausea. Bad sleep. It passes. Something like that I tell myself. I want to drive down and ski Echo but at 4 o’ clock I lie couchbound and for hours stare at the falling snow and Friday traffic stacking up westbound on 70.
I ski two more days, fly to Texas. Houston sits 79 feet above sea level and I feel better there. I watch Michigan win the football national championship game sober from my seats high above the field. This kicks me into a sort of delirium and I feel so good I wonder whether I’ve imagined my stomach problems.
Back in New York the GI tells me that “sometimes heart issues express themselves as stomach issues.” This sounds like an expensive waste of time. But I walk to the NYU clinic on Manhattan Avenue. It’s crowded and chaotic and everyone is speaking Polish and I almost leave but I stay for all the tests.
“Something is wrong,” the cardiologist tells me, pointing to my EKG, to a hump that looks like any other hump among rows of them. He produces my EKGs from 2020, from 2007. They are identical to one another but different from this one. I schedule something called a nuclear stress test three weeks from that day.
I ski MLK weekend at Camelback. I drive to Hickory and ride the Poma. I roadtrip west through Blue Knob and Canaan Valley and White Grass and Laurel and Hidden Valley. I take my son skiing at Mt. Peter and my daughter skiing on a skies-dumping day at Belleayre.
On Jan. 31 I drink a radiated fluid and wait and a robot scans my chest and then I wait again. I stand shirtless with a dozen suction cups wired to various machines. “You’re in good shape,” the technician says. A formality, as I’d suspected. But as she raises the treadmill’s speed and angle I am back wheezing at the top of Copper Mountain. They stop the test early. The robot scans me again.
Aides of all sorts gather. “We have a big problem,” the cardiologist tells me. “A blocked artery. We call it 'The Widowmaker.’” I could have dropped dead at any moment over the past several months, he says. “You’re a lucky guy,” he says. “Because we caught this and we know exactly how to fix it.”
A widowmaker heart attack is a type of heart attack in which you have a full blockage in your heart’s biggest artery. This artery, the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, sends oxygen-rich blood to your heart’s left ventricle. This lower chamber pumps oxygen-rich blood to your aorta, which sends it to your body.
Any heart attack is life-threatening, but the so-called widowmaker heart attack is among the deadliest types.
Heart attacks can be deadly, and the widowmaker is one of the deadliest kinds. It can happen suddenly when a key artery that moves blood to the heart gets almost or completely blocked. Without emergency treatment, you may not survive.
An amazing machine, the heart. I ride my bike and eat tacos and nap and drink wine and read and fly around the world and swim and ride chairlifts and the whole time my heart just pounds without reminders or tune-ups or downtime or parts flown in from Switzerland. How long does a really good car last? 20 years, maybe, if you take really good care of it. And a car is hardly ever actually running. Jeanne Louise Calment, born Feb. 21, 1875, died on Aug. 4, 1997. Imagine a machine in continuous motion for 122 years. I’ve yet to find a plug-in cat water fountain that lasts longer than 16 weeks.
I spend two nights at NYU hospital with IV ports dangling from my forearms. The Widowmaker was, indeed, fully blocked. I’d survived only because my heart had drilled a network of tributaries around the blockage. But this was a temporary fix, like plywood over a blown-out window. With a catheter run through my right wrist the doctor clears the plaque and inserts a 30-millimeter-long stent. I am conscious during the procedure but with a fentanyl drip I don’t mind at all and I talk to the doctors as they work.
Like a new body now. The heart, again, unleashed. So many pills: blood pressure, blood thinners, blood flow, cholesterol, aspirin. But I’m cleared to ski. I fly the kids to Whistler for midwinter break and lap Lutsen with friends I’ve known since I was 5 and bomb powder glades for two glorious days at Jay Peak. A stent delivers a return to normal life, indefinitely. That is the hope, anyway. But how something so simple can permanently repair something so complex as the heart is a thing I do not understand. Like stretching duct tape across the wing of an F-16 and hoping it flies.
As my body recovers, my head struggles. At home after the procedure I am a ghost. At least at first. Wondering, what would have been the last thing I wore? The last thing I ate? How much gas did I leave in the minivan that my wife won’t drive? Who will tend to symmetry in the dishwasher? Things piled where I left them. A drawer full of notebooks. A bottle of red wine we bought in France in 2015. It wasn’t expensive but we bought it at the end of a country road wandering without GPS and we’ve saved it for something special.
I‘ve felt the sensation of dying before. A condition called vasovagal syncope. The world disintegrates as the heart slows to near stopping. Six times this has happened to me: fifth grade when a kids-don’t-smoke video showed us a tracheotomy patient; eighth grade while delivering an oral book report on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I hadn’t read in four years; 12th grade when the teacher chose my arm to demonstrate the mechanics of the blood drive to our classroom; age 19 at the grocery store where I worked an overnight shift after I’d hardly slept or eaten in several days; then twice in one day in October 2020, once when I woke up with unexplained vertigo, the hallway tilting like a storm-tossed ship, and again in the emergency room when I looked down at the blood drawing from my arm.
Every time I wake up I say, “I thought I was dying.” It’s why I’m so nuts about the chairlift safety bar. Knowing that I could blink out at any moment. If I’d started to fade at Copper or NRG Stadium or the glades at Canaan that’s probably what I would have thought was happening. “Oh this again.” But it would be a heart attack instead and I probably wouldn’t have woken up.
But it didn’t happen. I did not die.
All I’ve ever wanted to do is write. Words flow as my heart beats. I don’t get blocks (no pun intended). It’s not easy necessarily but it’s not hard for me like most things are hard for me, like calculus or chemistry or sending mail. Writing is a kind of mental engineering. There’s a river and your ideas can cross on a bridge or in a tunnel or on a boat or by swimming or on the back of a gazelle or with a hang glider or by dropping from the clouds like rain. There is no one answer and there is no right answer but there is always an answer. I enjoy this puzzle. My life’s quest has been to create something that matters with words. The Storm, at last, has given me that platform. So this is not a mid-life crisis that ends with me selling everything I own to go build orphanages in Panama. I like my life and I like what I do and I’m glad that I get to keep doing it and I plan on doing it as long as I’m here. Meaning as long as I’m alive.
But of course I am reflecting. Italian Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi examined the tortured condition of the writer as a general archetype in this passage from The Monkey’s Wrench (1978) that has followed me around for 26 years:
“I acknowledged that, indeed, writers’ nerves did tend to be weak, but it’s difficult to determine whether the nerves weaken because of writing … or whether the writing profession simply attracts people who are predisposed to anxiety. Unquestionably, however, many writers are neurasthenics*, or at least they become that way … and many others end up in mental institution or some equivalent, and not only in this century but in many centuries past; there are also a lot of writers who don’t exhibit any obvious signs of illness, but who live badly, get depressed, drink, smoke, don’t sleep, and die young.”
I’ve never thought of myself as a nervous person, but I can be rash and reactive and petty and angry. This is probably why I stopped reading my Twitter mentions. But the angsty writer within has expressed itself mostly as a mania to Always Be Writing. Or to place myself into a state incompatible with the activity, which, in the past, has mostly involved drinking amazing quantities of beer.
But I don’t believe in the glory of dying young. I’d prefer to be an old writer. Pete Hamill or H.L. Mencken or Gore Vidal, tomes stacked in trunks in the basement when I fall down dead at an appropriate old age.
*dictionary.com: an ill-defined medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.
Gratitude list: that one Tinder swipe in 2013, autumn tailgates, work-from-home, a patio in Brooklyn, cats, the subway, witness to my kids’ first breaths, naps, two dozen childhood friends that persist, Central Park, hot showers, bike lanes, The Legend of Zelda, Motley Fool, that Manhattan can exist as part of America, circa 1990s Skiing magazine, Dispatches, The Storm worked, Cadbury Eggs, living in the future. I’ve kept a journal since age 18 and it’s probably the reason I never resorted to barfighting as a pastime. I’m 46 and I still have all my hair. But mostly that I didn’t die last month and leave my wife and kids alone.
Toxic traits to work on since I’m still here: I don’t burn bridges, I nuke them. I am bad at admin and maintenance. I dislike sharing desserts, even with my kids.
I dislike parades, crafts, air-conditioning, Dr. House MD, PB&Js, people who watch videos on their phones with no headphones. No amount of introspection is likely to change any of this.
Feb. 27 I sit for an echocardiogram. I watch my heart pulse and leap in its fantastic metronome, like a thing apart from me entirely, like aggressively earthy anime, like a strange interdimensional cartoon character lodged in a permanent jump-roping trance. I hadn’t expected that. The raw power of the heart, the range and force of its movement.
The doctors can’t say how I got here. I’m active, happily married, don’t smoke, eat clean enough, enjoy my work, sleep plenty, take vacations, have friends. I’m a poor candidate for chronic lifestyle disease. And yet: coronary artery disease is the diagnosis (though my other arteries were clear). I’ve cleaned up my diet, dropped sugar and red meat, probably mostly forever.
It was not obvious that I should write this. But as I lay recovering in the hospital, I tapped out an Instagram post summarizing the stupid tricks my body pulled and how I’d taken the time to visit the doctor even though I have no time for anything ever. And you know, it saved my life. And a bunch of my friends commented like, “Dang Brah I gotta get me one of them nuclear stress tests” and so on.
This email newsletter is my largest platform, with more readers than any of my social accounts, personal or Storm. So this is my PSA. Even if you’re active and healthy and eat well and think you’re bulletproof and live the best life since bubblegum, listen to your body when it tells you something isn’t right.
Also, if I haven’t responded to your email, or seem a little behind in the podcast, or just in general seem a little out of it, this is why. And I’m sorry. But back to work.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 91/100 in 2024, and number 591 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019.
Another great article, or PSA, as you titled it. Your ability to bring people into your world so seemlessly is incedibile. It is a piece writing like this that keeps my faith in journalism. I make it a requirement of my beer league teammates to subscribe to the Storm. It needs to be supported. Don't stop your fight against people who watch phone videos without earbuds. That is a hill to die on. Go Blue.
The cat fountain line really got me. Glad you're alive!