Do You Ever Recover From Nearly Dying?

      Here is the amazing thing: the other week was the second anniversary of my almost dying … and I didn’t notice it at all. I hadn’t realized the date had come … and gone.

      I didn’t remember to mark the moment. I didn’t stop to look back. I didn’t pause to consider how far I had come. I didn’t announce the anniversary and celebrate my recovery with my family. The date passed no differently than the day before or the day after.

      It was only sometime later, after the anniversary of my nearly fatal heart attack had gone by without so much as a thought, that it hit me and I thought how remarkable it was that it wasn’t remarkable.

      Studies have found that nearly a quarter of heart attack survivors develop clinically significant PTSD symptoms. Many more experience sub-threshold trauma reactions that still affect the quality of their lives.

      A near-fatal experience such as a serious heart attack often can lead to depression and even grief, over a sense of lost invincibility. There is, frequently, a heightened sense of mortality and a feeling that you have been betrayed by your own body. The moment of the near-fatal experience generally leaves a significant scar.

      In the immediate few months after the heart attack, I felt some of that. I was scared and worried that I would never be the same again. I was super-sensitive to every bodily reaction, to every fluctuation in how I felt, to every flutter—real or imagined—in my chest.

      Not surprising, of course. A friend, who had a serious heart attack more than 20 years ago, says there has not been a day that has gone by since then when, at some point, he hasn’t thought about his heart attack.

      Now, just two years out, I still do think of it, if not every day at least occasionally. When there’s a flutter, it brings back at least a hint of the dread. But that anxiety usually passes reasonably quickly. As time has worn on, as the actual attack has receded more into the distance, I think about it less and worry about it less. I have gotten on with my life.

      I have been able to compete in 5Ks. I have run on trails and on tracks. I have lifted weights and increased the number of pushups I can do. I have traveled to faraway places and hiked on volcanoes and traipsed around forests closer to home. I have eaten pizza, though not as often, and I have learned to dine, most of the time, without wine. I have even tried non-alcoholic wine, although I would not recommend it.

      I have gone to the movies and had lunches with friends and read books and attended protests and done all the standard, normal things I had done before that day two years ago. And the more I do, the more normal my life has become, the more that almost-fatal day recedes. Two years later, no clinical depression, no panic attacks. My brush with death has left, it would seem, only superficial scars.

      Of course, the scars never completely fade. When there’s a new fleeting flutter in my chest, I don’t—I cannot—dismiss it. That’s when I recognize I am, of course, no longer the person I was a little more than two years ago. A brush with death inevitably changes you.

      I have learned, though, that it doesn’t have to define you.