Test of the Heart

This is the story of a heart operation. It’s also the story of a marriage.

On September 11, 2002, the anniversary of the day planes smashed into the World Trade Center, my husband, Stephen, had three heart attacks. I found him trembling when I came downstairs after putting the children to bed. Twice in the past thirty minutes, he told me, he’d felt dizzy and nauseous, and had broken out in a cold sweat. He felt tingling in his arms. No chest pain, though, and both times it passed quickly. Stress, he said, or maybe indigestion, since his stomach was upset. He said he was fine, his face grey against the grey couch, and he was determined not to go to the hospital.

I agreed it could be stress. He had come home around nine that night, tired and hungry. Stephen was tired a lot in those days, and he sometimes fell asleep at his desk. He didn’t look well.

We had two young kids, driven careers, and never enough time. Why wouldn’t he be exhausted? But it went beyond that. Dating back to when I was on the road as a documentary producer for cbc’s The National, and later, when I worked as a tenure-track professor, Stephen had done far more than his fair share of the housework. Between that and his own deadline-driven work as a furniture designer, he was as busy as anyone I knew. There was no time to exercise, no time to relax, just an endless blur of domestic and work-related demands. That day, he had rushed from work to the pool to register our son for swimming class. Business as usual. Until it wasn’t.

Neither of us said the words “heart attack.” Stephen agreed to a compromise: if the wave of symptoms came back a third time, I’d phone. Otherwise, we’d forget the whole thing and get him to bed. As soon as I agreed to that, he went pale. I called 911.

The ambulance arrived right away. It stayed in our driveway for forty-five minutes, lights blazing, the brightest point in the darkness. The children never woke up. The paramedics ran tests and gave Stephen some medication. It didn’t feel real. The paramedics joked; Stephen joked. Then they drove him to the hospital. Better safe than sorry.

We’d gone to Europe that summer, and I still study photos, looking for clues that something was wrong. There aren’t any. All I see is a compact fifty-one-year-old man with a beard and a large smile, with his arms around his eleven-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter. But then again, should we have known? When we ran up the steps of Sacré Coeur, overlooking the night lights of Paris, Stephen couldn’t keep up. And then there’s the way he lugged our luggage up and down the steps of the metro stations and gasped for breath. Who knew what was waiting a few short weeks later?

When the children got up the next morning, I told them their dad had felt unwell in the night and had gone into hospital for some tests, but all was fine. My son took this in stride. My daughter looked at her brother, full of his usual high spirits, and burst into tears. “He doesn’t hear what you’re really saying,” she said to me. Really saying? In retrospect, I realize how odd this was, because I didn’t think I was worried. The paramedics had been surprised when Stephen walked himself out to meet them. As their ambulance lights glowed in the driveway, they’d even questioned whether he needed to go to hospital. That had to count for something.

I got the children off to school and phoned the hospital. Stephen sounded tired but in good spirits. They’d done a preliminary blood enzyme test, he said, and he hadn’t had a heart attack, but the doctors suspected he might have one in the future if he didn’t change his ways. “Good,” I thought, “he needed this kind of warning to slow down.”

They kept him there to run another precautionary test, and I headed for the hospital. This time, the results were different. Stephen would need an angiogram the next day. We reassured each other that everything was fine, but now the train was picking up speed.