Open Heart Read Free

medicine and cardiology at Presbyterian-University of Pennsylvania Medical Center—and these past few weeks he and I have been talking nearly every day. In the week to ten days preceding the angiogram, a fact I found both welcome and disquieting, he had been calling me several times each day.
    Later that afternoon Rich calls and says he is not at all surprised at what the angiogram revealed and that, based on his talks with Jerry, he has every confidence in Dr. Hashim and the people at Yale. He reminds me that he had been urging me into the hospital—gently, gently, so as not to scare me—for several weeks.
    When my family practitioner, while not excluding the possibility of coronary disease, thought the symptoms that had made me call for an appointment—some occasional shortness of breath while swimming—were due to adult-onset or exercise-induced asthma, and when a local cardiologist, finding some anomalies in an electrocardiogram and an echocardiogram, while also not excluding coronary disease, thought the problem was probably viral, Rich had exploded. “ It’s not viral, goddamnit! ” he had exclaimed, in the first burst of exasperation I’d heard from him since I’d begun talking with him about my concerns. “I want you in the hospital as soon as possible.”
    The local cardiologist had recommended that I have an angiogram done at Bay State Hospital in Springfield, but when I called his office to make an appointment, the colleague who performed the angiograms was booked for several weeks. I was persistent and secured a “brief office visit” a week later, not for the angiogram, but to confer about setting up an appointment for the angiogram. Then I had telephoned Rich, Jerry, and Phil.
    â€œListen,” I’d said to Rich, as I had to Jerry the day after I’d received the results of the EKG and the echocardiogram, “why don’t you guys all talk with one another and then just tell me what to do?”
    On Sunday morning, Jerry phoned to say that he and Rich had decided I should come down to Yale and that Dr. Cabin would be calling me at home (as he did) to arrange for the angiogram.
    Now, less than a week later, Rich says that, barring the unforeseen, he feels certain that the bypass surgery and the recovery from the surgery will go swiftly and smoothly. He asks about my children, and I tell him I’ve spoken with each of them and that they will all be arriving at the hospital before surgery the next morning.
    Aaron is already on his way down from Northampton by bus; Eli is on his way from New York City by train; and Miriam and her fiancé Seth will be taking a three A. M . train from Washington, D.C., and will arrive early the next morning. I tell Rich I was surprised that they didn’t hesitate, and will be with me—I note that I didn’t ask any of them to come—and Rich tells me he is surprised that I was surprised. Why wouldn’t my children want to be with me at a time like this?
    After supper, Dr. Hashim stops by and talks with me for a while. Dr. Hashim is Lebanese and therefore, I expect, speaks French. I tell him I lived in France for two years some thirty years ago, before and after my first child, Miriam, was born, and Dr. Hashim and I proceed to talk with each other in both French and English. Although he describes the surgery and explains the possible risks attendant to it, such as stroke, retinal damage, cognitive losses, and infection, and says that, given the excellent state of my health, he sees no cause for concern, it is our conversation about things ordinary and familial that calms my fears and reassures. *
    When I comment on his name and its possible biblical origin, he tells me that yes, he believes he is a descendant of families that inhabited the ancient Hashemite kingdom. He asks about my name and I tell him my father’s family came from Ryminov, a shtetl in the Carpathian Mountains—from a