Last year, a friend with a heart challenge got off easy with a stent - that hollow plug inserted into the blocked artery during catheterization. He was fully active in a day or two. The location of my blockages at the top of the bifurcation of the arteries precluded stents. Both the perfect bypass (my good fortune) and the perfect stent in the perfect place have their imperfections. Recent complications with stents along with advances in surgery have tipped some cardiologists back to recommending bypass rather than doing the stent themselves.

When Frank Zeidler was asked at his birthday party how he lived to be 90, he said find a smart doctor, and choose good parents.

What made the problem mine and not a fluke of diet or exercise was family history.

I had no plans to trade in my parents for a newer model. While Mom gave me these arteries there appears little else worrisome in our family history. In fact, Mom’s passage taught us siblings where to focus, and from her grave she was now putting me on track for a timely surgery. I recall her waving good bye at the operating room door, her worry cushioned by the presence of children and grandchildren - clearly she knew that the mother-grandmother was still needed. Her instructive recovery and the overall excellent health I inherited were also her gifts. From her we learned of the dangers of second hand smoke, and, worse, the danger of dismissing heart attack symptoms which go untreated. Years before the table her heart was already damaged.

Since Mom’s surgery the bypass has enjoyed a variety of employers and has become an experienced worker. I remember reports of the first. How exciting to learn the heart and lungs could be turned off and held quietly during day-long surgeries because of the heart-lung bypass machine. The boomers, who follow my generation, are lucky again - so many new gadgets in any operating room where they will expand their lives. Let me recollect for you a treasured memory, that of almost losing my dear friend Ruth during her painful post-surgery struggle about the same time. “Never again,” both Mom and Ruth said, will they let them operate. (Frankly, I would. It’s all different now.)

Unless it comes late, with other issues. Post-surgery I would meet others severely challenged, like John Faragher, life-long, dearest friend, my Teacher to the end, who passed due to diabetic complications during heart surgery - two conditions medicated at cross purposes with each other. Where the ill gather, in hospitals and clinics, we learn quickly that someone else is more ill. If in these environs it raises your spirits to learn “Hey, I ain’t got it so bad” you may mend more quickly. That dying patient becomes then your Teacher. And, like John in passing, leaves students behind. Pass your exams, remain a student, learn from others.

Health is not a private affair.

One friend’s migraines will lay her out, erasing plans. When she apologized for missing dinner, I agreeably pointed out that I’d rather have my heart surgery than her life of migraines.

Professor and poetess Nikki Giovanni* rejected the free market privatization of illness in a dramatic moment at a Schwartz Books author reading several years ago. When she heard an audience member congratulate her for surviving cancer, she corrected the well-intended greeting. A cancer death assaults a whole family, a network of friends, she said. We are ALL survivors not just the individual who recovers.

Next: The Players

* University Distinguished Professor of literature at Virginia Tech who emerged as the prescient professor who warned the campus authorities about her troubled student, Seung-Hui Cho.

“A cancer death assaults a whole family, a network of friends, she said. We are ALL survivors not just the individual who recovers.”