Martha Weinman Lear - Heartsounds

For those who loved Hal

This is a true story.

Only some names have been changed.

Foreword

The past is never where you think you left it .

In ten lean words, the novelist Katherine Anne Porter pinned an elusive truth to the wall.

This book is an illustration of that truth. It is about a doctor who suddenly became a patient. He suffered a massive heart attack, followed by more heart attacks, ruinous open-heart surgery, medical error, arrogance, and indifference. Increasingly, this once-powerful surgeon found himself at the mercy of the profession in which he had always taken such pride.

Heartsounds is the story of that medical odyssey. It is also the story of a marriage. Both as the reporter and as the doctors wife, I watched it all happen and recorded what it did to his spirits and to my own, and what it taught us about love, about ourselves, about each other, and about the entangled strands of need, desire, autonomy, and dependency that constitute a marriage.

The book became a bestseller, which of course pleased me greatly but also threw me for a loop. It is a schizoid experience to have success emerge from grief. The book was made into a film, with the actors James Garner playing my husband and Mary Tyler Moore playing me. I received some two thousand letters from readers, many describing their own medical nightmares. You spoke for me, one typically said. You expressed all the angry feelings I never dared express. Heartsounds was my catharsis.

Many others were about our marriage: What you and Hal shared in that brief time was more than most people share in a lifetime and It was the most moving love story I have ever read. I felt like I knew you both. I cried when he died

All that was years agobittersweet history, I would have thought. But a recent personal event sent me plummeting back into that past, brought my life full circle, and led to a new book, a sequel of sorts, called Echoes of Heartsounds .

The event: I had a heart attack. No headliner there; each year, some seven hundred twenty thousand Americans suffer heart attacks. But now I found myself in my late husbands hospital, where he had trained as a surgeon, then treated patients, then become a patient, and then died. Same cardiac unit, same familiar corridors, even the same attending doctor. So the ghosts came swarming in.

Now another husband, also dearly loved, sat at my bedside as I had sat at Hals. Another husband wheeled me in a wheelchair through these corridors where I had wheeled Hal. And amid these ghosts and confusions, past and present began to merge and I kept traveling through time and space to that other bedside, that other marriagethat other life.

This book and the new one tell the story of both those lives. They are companion pieces. Heartsounds is the backstory, out of which everything else follows. Echoes of Heartsounds goes from the emotional storms and social quandaries of widowhood to the astonishment of finding new love in my senior years, and on to my sudden cardiac crisis and the persistence of those ghosts that forced me to confront the past and put it, finally, to rest.

Martha Weinman Lear

Part One

Chapter 1

He awoke at 7 A.M. with pain in his chest. The sort of pain that might cause panic if one were not a doctor, as he was, and did not know, as he knew, that it was heartburn.

He went into the kitchen to get some Coke, whose secret syrups often relieve heartburn. The refrigerator door seemed heavy, and he noted that he was having trouble unscrewing the bottle cap. Finally he wrenched it off, cursing the defective cap. He poured some liquid, took a sip. The pain did not go away. Another sip; still no relief.

Now he grew more attentive. He stood motionless, observing symptoms. His breath was coming hard. He felt faint. He was sweating, though the August morning was still cool. He put fingers to his pulse. It was rapid and weak. A powerful burning sensation was beginning to spread through his chest, radiating upward into his throat. Into his arm? No. But the pain was growing worse. Now it was crushing crushing , just as it is always described. And worse even than the pain was the sensation of losing all power, a terrifying seepage of strength. He could feel the entire degenerative process accelerating. He was growing fainter, faster. The pulse was growing weaker, faster. He was sweating much more profusely nowa heavy, clammy sweat. He felt that the life juices were draining from his body. He felt that he was about to die.

On some level he stood aside and observed all this with a certain clinical detachment. Here, the preposterous spectacle of this thin naked man holding a tumbler of Coke and waiting to die in an orange Formica kitchen on a sunny summer morning in the fifty-third year of his life.