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Martha Weinman Lear - Heartsounds: The Story of a Love and Loss

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The national bestseller and undying testament of a wifes love for her husband as he embarks on the fight of his life.
On a story assignment in France for the New York Times Magazine, Martha Weinman Lear has just escaped tourist-infested Cannes for a quiet pension in the hills behind the Riviera when she gets the call from New York. Her husband has suffered a massive heart attack and is in the hospital.
Harold Lear, a fifty-three-year-old urologist and leader in the field of human sexuality research, suddenly finds himself in the helpless role of the patient. Ripping into the Lears lives and marriage, Hals coronary disease sends them on a journey through New York Citys medical maze. With bittersweet poignancy, Lear chronicles her husbands valiant efforts to combat his sickness as more heart attacks and devastating postsurgical complications befall him.
A stunning work of medical drama and journalism, Heartsounds is above all the gripping story of a passionate, enduring love.

Martha Weinman Lear: author's other books


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Praise for Heartsounds Absorbing wild funny tender enraging absolutely - photo 1
Praise for Heartsounds Absorbing wild funny tender enraging absolutely - photo 2
Praise for Heartsounds Absorbing wild funny tender enraging absolutely - photo 3

Praise for Heartsounds

Absorbing, wild, funny, tender, enraging, absolutely remarkable An awesome and gripping book. It is about loving as much as about dying.

The New York Times Book Review

If love, humor, and determination could restore a ruined heart, surely the Lears would have won.

Cosmopolitan

Reads like a fine novel that has the additional resonance of truth.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

[A] powerful and moving account of a man, a woman and an illness.

The Dallas Morning News

A testament to the power of human love and the will to live!

Publishers Weekly

Heartsounds is a book that reads like a fine novel. A rare, beautifully written cry against the modern ways of death, against death itself: It is worth every degree of the pain it takes to read it.

Joanne Greenberg, Chicago Sun-Times

Heartsounds , a deeply felt account of a brave doctors fight for a full life after a crippling heart attack, is both a celebration of an enviably good marriage and a cry of outragea book filled with love and honor and roaring against the night.

Mordecai Richler, Book-of-the-Month Club News

It hurts, illuminates, loads the circuits with rage, transmits the energy of a great love beautifully written!

Gail Sheehy

Exhilaratingthanks to Lears proud honesty!

Gore Vidal

It is Love Story made honest and life-size!

Ira Levin

The most moving love story I have ever read.

Joanne Woodward

Written from the heart It has much to say about the human spirit. I cant imagine anyone reading this book without feeling the better for it.

Norman Cousins

No praise is too high for Heartsounds . An extraordinary book Martha has done a remarkable job balancing her love story with Hal, her desperate, angry struggle to save him, along with tough, specific reportage on the medical profession. What a sense Martha has for anecdote, for character, for time and place for life .

Patricia Bosworth

The most courageous book I have ever read A brilliant, powerful love story.

Nancy Friday

This is so lusty, so passionate and powerful a love story, that it seems to stand up to death itself.

Marlo Thomas

A searing chronicle of grace under pressure Readers may learn to make that ultimate toast with which Martha Lear concludes her book: Lchaim to life.

The San Francisco Examiner

Engrossing, touching and very frightening Martha Lear is an eloquent, powerful writer.

Dr. William A. Nolen, The Washington Post

Unsparing, proud One weeps through the last chapter.

Los Angeles Times

A deeply stirring book Though the story is a familiar one, I have never before read it set down with such power and emotion.

John Barkham Reviews

A riveting account of life and love and, yes, death.

The Washington Star

Heartsounds
The Story of a Love and Loss
Martha Weinman Lear

For those who loved Hal This is a true story Only some names have been - photo 4

For those who loved Hal

This is a true story.

Only some names have been changed.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright 1980 by Martha Weinman Lear

Cover design by Mauricio Daz

978-1-4976-4837-1

Published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com

Picture 5

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.

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