What I Learned About Life After My Husband’s Heart Attack
“Would you think I am crazy if I told you this heart attack is the best thing that has ever happened to me?” — My husband Roger
Thanksgiving fell late this year, on November 28th, 2019. It also happens to be one-year to the day of my husband Roger’s massive heart attack. It is truly the Thanksgiving that almost wasn’t. It has meant a big change in my life, initially for the worse, eventually for the better.
Thanksgiving is a special occasion to express gratitude. For this year, we truly have something to be thankful for — life itself. When we express gratitude, it is often for the accessories of life: a new job, a better salary, a bigger house, a good buy. How often do we pause and reflect on the greatest gift of all… life itself? We can often get so busy “living” that we cover over “life” itself.
The poem What Birds and Children Know Roger found from the Scottish Recorder in 1930 makes the point beautifully.
I need wide spaces in my heart,
Where faith and I can grow apart,
and grow serene.
Life gets so choked by busy living,
Kindness so lost in fussy giving,
That love slips by unseen.
I want to make a quiet place,
Where those I love can see God’s face,
Can stretch their hearts across the earth,
Can understand what Spring is worth:
Can count the stars;
Watch violets grow,
And learn what birds and children know.
It was about 3:30pm November 28, 2018. We were driving on the highway. He started to have severe chest pains again, after our emergency room episode the night before. His face was turning pale; a cold sweat was breaking out; he was shivering. Later he described his physical sensation as “a 400-pound bag of cement was pressing on the front of his chest, a sharp hatchet was stuck between his shoulder blades, and two vises were tightly clamping his wrists”. My deepest impression was that he was out of breath. It felt like a narrowing tunnel, collapsing soon, blocking out all the sunshine.
The ambulance came, picked him up from the side of the highway and shot him through the emergency room to the Cath Lab. I followed to the emergency room, and waited outside the Cath Lab.
When the nurse came out of the surgery room and informed me that “your husband just had a massive heart attack”, it felt like she just took a club and hit me right on the head. My breath stopped at the mention of “massive heart attack”. That was the first time this phrase ever entered into my consciousness, as related to Roger. Well, what had I thought the problem was with him? Obviously, I was not thinking much.
That was the strongest “cognitive dissonance” I had ever experienced, the longest distance my mind had to travel to catch up with reality. By the time the doctor came out of the surgery room to meet me, I was still feeling breathless and dizzy. The only thing I could grasp from our conversation was “100% blockage”.
When I finally found Roger in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU), he was sitting up in bed chatting with the nurses. When he saw me, he uttered the sentence that changed my relationship with breath forever: “hey, baby, it is so nice to take a breath without pain”. He was in his surgery gown, pale but relaxed. Compared to when I last saw him about one hour ago in the ambulance, he was indeed in a much better shape.
Since then his health has been on a steady upward trajectory. One year later today, he is almost back to his normal self physically. Yet intellectually, emotionally and spiritually we have traveled such a long way. We are both better people because of the life lessons we learned from this experience.
I am sharing the following six transformative lessons we have learned from our experience, hoping you will benefit from them.
1. Life looks very different through the lens of death.
Before his heart attack, we were occupied getting ready for my Green Card interview on Nov. 29, 2018. After a grueling 18-month application process, we were ready to seal the deal with the interview. The only thing we needed to do was to show up. Our attorney had taken care of reviewing everything for us. It was a straightforward case.
Had we gone to the doctor’s office the morning of Nov. 28, we would have avoided the heart attack. Instead we decided that we did not want any bad news before the Green Card interview. we decided to go to the doctor’s right after the interview. This decision almost cost Roger’s life. It certainly cost him a piece of his heart.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Looking back, especially after receiving my Green Card, I wonder why on earth did we attach so much importance to a Green Card interview. An interview seems so insignificant compared to a threat of death. Yet how many times we “do not see the forest for the trees”? I always love the Chinese proverb known as the number analogy about life:
All the accessories in life are just more zeros and life itself is the One… without the One, more zeros is still just a sheer void.
It is such a strange thing to look at life from the perspective of death. The fear for death lies in its absoluteness and finality… once the threshold is crossed, there is no turning back. However, I often think how many ‘relative deaths’ we experience on a day to day basis. To me, every day when the curiosity for life is not renewed is a relative death; every morning when we do not feel inspired by our mission on this earth is a relative death; every moment when we are not living in the present is a relative death.
The beauty of life is that so long as we are alive, we still have opportunities. The potential is truly unlimited. We all have the power to make a change right now.
2. Optimism bias is real, especially when it comes to health. Overcome it with a disciplined routine.
Optimism bias refers to a cognitive bias that causes a person to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is so real, especially when it comes to a negative health event. Our optimism bias caused us to miss the best window for intervention.
The symptoms for a troubled heart had been there for a while. He had felt terribly winded when he walked up the driveway to the mailbox. His hands and wrists had had severe pains for a while. One afternoon in July, I called him, and it startled him. He jumped up from the bed, blacked out and fell right backward. I scraped my knees to catch him, avoiding a major head injury. I remember him sitting up and saying “oh wow, that might just be what death is like, a sudden blackout”.
As I am writing this, I realized that death had been on his mind. He was basically choking to death slowly with the gradual blockage of his artery. Thinking back, I wonder how I could have been so ignorant as to let all the symptoms slip by without taking any notice.
Daniel DeNicola articulated the impact of what we do not know beautifully in his book Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know:
…how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life.
Incomplete information, or not making sense of information correctly all lead to optimism bias. He has had chronic kidney disease for a number of years, and we just assumed that the symptoms were from his deteriorating kidney and aging. The writing on the wall could be staring at us, but we did not see what we were not looking for.
Ignorance is a necessary evil in life, because none of us can be 100% informed of everything. But we can overcome optimism bias by following a disciplined routine. It turned out that the last time Roger visited his cardiologist was 6 years ago. Even though he had a clean bill of health on his heart at that time, even though he was lean and fit, still, it was pretty dangerous practice for a man in his mid-sixties not to visit a heart doctor more regularly.
So, dear readers, do not take good health for granted. Have regular physical checkups. Guard you health and your heart. Start right now.
3. This experience is deeply personal and highly systemic.
On the evening of Nov. 27, 2018, he started to have angina with elevated blood pressure, which brought us to the emergency room. Angina is like a half-active volcano, and EKG only picks up indicators when the volcano is active. When we arrived at the hospital, the volcano was inactive, so the EKG came out normal. This took the “emergency” out of the picture, and we were given a number to wait in line for a blood test.
At midnight, the emergency room seemed extra full. I have known about the abuse of emergency room for a long time and have actually done a study on emergency room usage for my master’s research course. But when it came to my husband, exhausted from severe pain, having to wait on a hard chair in this overcrowded room at midnight, I still found it hard to believe. The emergency room is supposed to be for emergencies, but there was almost no sense of urgency anywhere that I could feel that night. We waited for almost an hour, and there were still about 20 people in front of us. By then Roger’s had not had any more chest pains for a few hours, so we decided to come home.
I very rarely regret anything, but this is one of the times when I truly regretted. I wish we had stayed. I wish the nurse could have explained to us that Roger was at a high risk of heart attack given his age and his symptoms, and that if we waited for the blood test, it would have shown. In this age of “big data”, such a pattern should have been pretty easy to recognize for a competent medical professional. This of course would be provided that the nurse actually cared, but she did not. All she cared about was that she did not have any liability, so the only thing she had for us was paperwork. We signed and left, which turned out to be among the worst decisions we have ever made.
You cannot pull a hair without the entire body feeling it.
My point is not to blame the nurse. As a systems thinker, I see the many forces at play. The nurse was only one player of this overburdened medical system, desperately trying to please all its stakeholders. The Chinese proverb explains this the best: you cannot pull a hair without the entire body feeling it. The need for a better medical system is not just a slogan…it is a life and death issue for every one of us when the occasion arises.
4. “How to make the best of this” is a better question to ask than “what if we did this”.
Not all decisions have bad consequences. But this one surely did. That is why there are so many regrets, so many ‘what if’s. What if I picked up his symptoms early on? What if I insisted that we stayed at the ER for the blood test the night before? What if we went to the doctor’s in the morning? The heart attack could have easily been avoided, so could the damage to his heart.
Sometimes I feel buried under guilt.
However, I also realize that ‘what if’ scenarios bind us excessively to the past without any real benefit for the present. We could always have made better decisions. We could always have done better for loved ones. But time is like an arrow, and it only flies forward. So, the question becomes: is there a better way to make sense of losses?
Having lost both my parents by the time I was ten and growing up in an orphanage in China, I used to be plagued with ‘what if’ questions. What if my parents did not die? What if my biological family did not abandon me? What if I did not have to spend 10 years under the tyranny of that house mother in the orphanage? But these questions did not help me one bit. They keep me stuck in a “victim mindset” because they blame others for my misery. Worse still, they take my own agency away, my own capacity to make life better.
In my healing process, I have come to adopt the belief that whatever happens to me is the best, even though it is often beyond my understanding at the time. If it is not the best, then make it the best. Accept everything as a blessing, and work to unwrap the presents.
I learned that the better question to ask is: how can I make the best out of this? Once I started to ask this question after the heart attack, everything started to fall into place. Roger’s healing journey became much smoother.
Best of all, this event has compelled Roger to reexamine his life. As a result, he is a better man.
He sacrificed a small piece of his heart to mend his soul. That was how he made the best of it.I dedicated my loving care to his healing. That was how I made the best of it.
Life could always have been worse. Over the past year, we lost two good friends, one to lung cancer, the other to traffic accident. Another good friend is fighting cancer and had to spend this Thanksgiving in the hospital. The heart attack started to feel like a real blessing, when I thought to myself: thankfully there is no cancer growing in Roger’s body,
5. Staying calm is the best you can do for a loved one going through life-and-death crisis
What sustained me through the heart attack and later the seven days in the CCU was an uncanny sense of calmness, as if I was at the eye of the storm.
There is a saying that a coward is scared before going into an adventure, a hero is scared after the adventure is over. While I do not consider myself a hero, I somehow, most strangely was not scared going into this.
When we were by the side of the highway waiting for the first responders, when he was desperately gasping for air and struggling with piercing pains, I felt helpless, yet calm; it almost felt as if I was in flow. It was like a sweet surrender, because I knew there was nothing I could do. It was also a deep feeling of faith, because I truly believed he was going to be okay, that eventually all this pain would recede and he would be healed. Where did this faith come from? Maybe from my conviction that his best years are yet to come. At that time, we were married for barely a year, a few weeks short of our first anniversary. For what life had put both of us through, the fact that we were married was a miracle in and of itself. There was no reason life should play another cruel joke on us. We had already been dealt our fair share of bad hands.
This calmness was also born of necessity, because I knew I had to be there for him. Care taking requires a lot of practical consideration. I had already laid out the plan: when he was picked up from the ambulance, I needed to drive the truck to the emergency room; if he was admitted into the hospital, I needed to make one-hour trips back and forth between the hospital and home for however long was needed…There was just no room for fear; anxiety was a luxury.
I often think of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Choosing to have faith and stay calm has made all the difference, for both of us.
6. You do get used to anything.
About the fourth or fifth day in the CCU, when he was well enough to sit up in the chair, we struck up a conversation with an older lady who had had seven stints put in her heart. For me, that took the novelty of the heart attack away, and signaled my total acceptance of his condition. By then, having a stent in his heart felt just like wearing a pair of glasses.
His body went through a period of adjusting to the medicine, when he would feel dizzy, depressed, lethargic. There were set backs and plateaus, then gradually his body made peace with the medicine as well. He dramatically changed his diet. I jokingly call him a “fruitarian”, as opposed to a “carnivore”. He has transferred his love for red meat to fruit, and that has made the biggest difference on his overall health. Now he has become an advocate for health shakes.
Did you ever have an experience where you find a “life changing event” is actually pretty commonplace? Since Roger’s heart attack, we found out that everybody has had some sort of connection with heart attacks, either personally, or through their family or friends. I have two theories for this.
One is a well-established psychological phenomenon called “frequency illusion”, which basically means you see what you are looking for. For example, when you buy a new Kia SUV, you suddenly notice Kia SUVs everywhere , on the road, on TV, in people’s driveways…
My second theory is that just as kindness begets kindness, vulnerability begets vulnerability. Ironically, our physical challenges unite us more than anything. After all, human beings are 99.9% identical in our genetic makeups. The body turns out to be a great vehicle for relating to each other empathetically.
We live in society where most social spaces are for “glamour”. We are often preoccupied with “keeping up with the Jones”. How does the not-so-glamorous part of ourselves ever get a chance to express itself? Sometimes it takes an invitation for vulnerability, an opportunity for deeper connection. We are getting used to that as well. We would not have it any other way.
That is why this is truly …. the best thing that has ever happened to us.
