MVR Part 2
A couple of weeks ago was the one-year anniversary of the date I found out that my heart is defective, and to celebrate I went in for another echo-cardiogram. Yesterday the cardiologist called to talk about the results. It wasn’t what I was hoping to hear.
My heart did not spontaneously heal itself. That would have been miraculous, but I would have been okay with that. I was actually hoping that things didn’t change, that my heart would be consistent in its inefficient but steadfast effort to keep my blood flowing, mostly in the right direction. But nope, things have gotten worse. Where I was “mild to moderate” a year ago, I am now “severe.” While expressing concern to my doctor about the rapidity of the change, he told me that he thinks he underestimated the severity of the situation last year. Something about the fact that the blood, instead of shooting straight through the defective valve, squirts off at an angle and curls around the chamber, making it harder to measure the volume. Evidently I’m supposed to take some comfort in the fact that my heart problem was worse than I thought all along. Yay, I guess.
None of this means that I’m likely to collapse and die at any moment. It does mean that surgical intervention is inevitable. When I pressed him for a timetable, the doctor guessed that I would need a valve repair or replacement sometime in the next three to five years. Based on a very small sample size, I think that doctors tend to be overly optimistic about this kind of thing, so if it happens sooner I won’t be at all surprised.
The sign that it is time to do the surgery will come when I start experiencing symptoms. As of now, the only symptom is a fairly regular weird feeling in my chest, as if my heart misses a beat, then tries to make up for it with an extra big squeeze. What I haven’t experienced is a feeling of breathlessness when lying down. This is evidently a major sign of trouble. When I told my doctor that I was walking more than running these days, he seemed a little disappointed. He explained that my performance data over time could be a useful early indicator of things starting to go down hill. Since I need to do some cross-training anyway, until my knee recovers completely, I’ve been throwing in some running and light weights in lieu of a walk every now and then. It feels good. If he wants data, I’ll give him data. But the bottom line is that when my valve eventually expires, it will likely happen gradually, so that even if I am in the middle of nowhere in Shikoku, I’ll have plenty of time to get home to my own doctor. In theory, anyway.
Of course, I can’t help but consider the possibility that my number is coming up. It is easy to focus on the fact that my maternal grandmother lived to see her 103rd birthday, and forget that my dad died at 67, his father at about the same age (of a heart problem), his mother younger than that, and my maternal grandfather died in his early 50’s. Most people outside of my immediate circle probably wouldn’t bat an eye to hear that I had joined the choir invisible. When babies or children die, it is so terrible that we don’t even have a sufficient word in our language to describe it. "Devastating" tries to be that word, but comes up short. When young adults die, it is “tragic.” When people in their forties and fifties die, it is “sad.” When people my age die, regardless of how youthful I might feel, it is within acceptable tolerances. People my age are featured in the obituaries every damn day. Biologically, I’m pretty much just a drain on a system intent on churning out new combinations of DNA. Although, to the latter point, I might argue that if for some unlikely reason they had to put me in the game, I think I could still throw strikes.
So in a way, this is kind of a cool thing. I’ve been given fair warning. I have been slapped upside the human tendency to believe that life will never end. I have some time and some inspiration to prepare, and to tie up loose ends. I can take some steps to make things easier for those I leave behind. I can get rid of some shit, so somebody else doesn’t have to. I can use up some sick days. I can refuse to do things that waste my time. I can toss the Playboys from under my mattress. I can refrain from putting things off. I can teach my wife how to use all four remote controls, so that she can still watch TV after I’m gone.
(Update: Nov 28, 2016 Florence Henderson of The Brady Bunch fame died a couple of days ago. Heart problems related to her repaired valve. She was 82.)