One Year out
It’s been just about a year.
During the year, these last 12 months, I’ve traveled abroad and explored archeological ruins. I’ve run a 5K, hiked to the top of a (small) mountain and helped launch and kept functioning a new website (this one, in fact).
I’ve been interviewed on podcasts and written about no longer caring much about baseball. I’ve eaten at nice restaurants and some not so nice, where I couldn’t hear much of anything because the restaurant was so damn noisy. I’ve read some wonderful books and some not-so-memorable ones that, in fact, I can’t remember much about.
I’ve lived through a despairingly awful election and the despondency that came afterwards.
I’ve celebrated another birthday, another wedding anniversary, the birthdays of my wife and kids and various holidays. I’ve given thanks on Thanksgiving, really given thanks.
That is, all in all, a pretty ordinary year. Yet none of it was a given, because just about a year ago, I almost died.
Nearing the end of 2023, we were preparing for our daughter’s visit home and getting ready for a book launch planned for just after the start of the new year. And then on New Year’s weekend, I had a near-fatal heart attack.
In essence, I did die, if briefly. My heart stopped while doctors feverishly worked on me. They had to shock my heart five times to get it pumping again. They had to do CPR on me for nearly three minutes.
They thought they had lost me, the cardiologist said later.
The first few months after that were anything but ordinary. I went home from the hospital wearing an extraordinarily uncomfortable “lifevest,” a portable defibrillator that I kept on constantly for a month, every minute except while showering. It beeped erratically and threatened to shock my heart regularly unless I pressed a couple of de-activating buttons.
l went through three months of cardiac rehab, multiple electrodes attached to my chest, recording how my repaired heart was reacting to increasing levels of exercise. I had sessions with a nutritionist and added an assortment of new pills to my daily regimen. I took treadmill stress tests and had another MRI and met regularly with the cardiologist.
I cut down on cheese and wine and lowered my sodium intake and carefully read nutrition labels to eliminate foods high in saturated fats.
But—and this is the part that seems difficult for me to fully comprehend—since those first few months it has been just a pretty ordinary year, an amazingly normal life. There are times I’ve almost completely forgotten how close I came to no more birthdays, no more traveling, no more eating out with friends, no more walks after dinner and no more mindlessly humming an old Beatles song to myself.
Life, indeed, does go on. But as I approach the anniversary of that excruciating chest pain and all that came after, I’ve learned to embrace the ordinary. How fortunate I am not just to visit archeological ruins and hike a (small) mountain. But to lunch with a friend or to watch a silly TV series episode with my wife or write this remembrance of a year filled with so much normalcy.
Ordinary, I’ve found out, can indeed be extraordinary.