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In my impressionable youth, books like Diet for a Small Planet, The Vegetarian Epicure, and Jane Fonda’s Workout Book were bestsellers. I absorbed their lessons and vowed to hew to the equation that healthy foods + healthy exercise = a long and healthy life.
I gave up red meat, then poultry, opting for vegetables, grains, cheeses, and the occasional fillet of baked salmon. I jogged regularly until my knees began complaining when I was in my 50s. Then I switched to walking briskly several times a week.
I watched my weight. I didn’t smoke. When people told me I looked younger than my age, I attributed it to the lessons learned in my youth.
Over the years, I’ve had a few health scares, including pneumonia in 2002 and reactive arthritis following a flu shot in 2008. But ever since I quit my last, extremely stressful, full-time job in 2012, I like to think I have been more or less the picture of health.
At least that was my assumption until the recent morning I found myself in the emergency room of my local hospital being evaluated for an inexplicably rapid heartbeat.
I had been having episodes of rapid heartbeat for a couple of weeks, but I had done my best to ignore them—until they became so rapid and persistent that I called my family doctor in alarm. To my surprise, she urged me to go to the nearest emergency room to be evaluated.
Fearful of driving myself there, I called my beau and asked if he would chauffeur me; he arrived at my door in record time.
As I was explaining my symptoms to the physician’s assistant at the ER, she had her eye on the heart monitor connected to me.
“Oh, wow, I just saw it!” she said, in a tone of triumph. My heart rate had suddenly shot up from 66 beats per minute to 138 beats per minute before sliding back down to a normal range.
In short order, she found me a bed in an emergency room bay. I traded my street clothes for a hospital gown, settled in, and was hooked up to yet another monitor.
With my worried beau sitting in a folding chair beside me, we waited for my heart to rev up again so the ER doctor could observe it. But now that it was being closely scrutinized, my heart apparently decided to quit misbehaving.
After nearly two hours of observation and only a few more instances of a racing heart, the doctor discharged me with a diagnosis of heart palpitations. She recommended a cardiologist; she urged me to schedule an appointment ASAP and to follow up with my family doctor.
She suggested I could have atrial fibrillation or tachycardia—neither of which sounded appealing to me.
But the nurse who gave me my discharge papers offered a glimmer of hope. She said the lab analysis of my blood sample showed that “aside from this”—i.e., my skittish heart—“you are really very healthy.”
In the days since, I feel as if I have entered a kind of altered reality.
I swiftly called the cardiologist’s office, only to learn the first available appointment for new patients is in July. I took it, but I wonder whether my heart will behave until then.
My family doctor was sympathetic and helpful. When I saw her after my ER visit, her guidance included: Take a low-dose aspirin each day, reduce stress, and avoid caffeine and substances with other stimulants. To my horror, this includes chocolate—one of my favorite foods.
It’s possible my heart’s crazy rhythm was caused by anxiety—or I could have developed a caffeine sensitivity. If so, I should be able to calm it down by making some lifestyle changes.
Given how much time I have spent since last year consumed by dreadful news stories and pandemic-related anxiety, it occurs to me that I might actually have worried myself sick.
But I could have a more serious heart problem—one that no amount of herbal tea or happy thoughts can cure. If that’s the case, I will have to seriously re-think my expectations for my future.
For years, I have blithely assumed I inherited the gift of longevity from my mother’s side of the family.
My mother died just six days before her 90th birthday. Her younger sister, her mother, and my mother’s two grandmothers all lived into their 90s—thanks to the sturdy genes of their Irish ancestors.
But now I wonder whether my cardiovascular system came from my father’s side—a family tree studded with heart attacks and, in the case of my father, a stroke that proved fatal.
My father died at 70. His father was just 54 when he had a fatal heart attack on his way to work. My great-grandfather died two weeks before his 74th birthday; his 1922 obituary said he was "attacked by heart disease." Few people on my paternal side—male or female—seem to have reached their 80th birthday.
Discovering that the end of my road of life may be much closer than I thought is hard to process. I assumed I had another 25 years, give or take. Instead, Fate may have scheduled me to check out before I hit 70—no matter how healthy my diet or how faithfully I exercised over the years.
I don’t plan to revise my life expectancy projections until after my cardiology appointment. And I am fully aware I could be carried off by an accident or other calamity tomorrow, even if there is nothing wrong with my heart.
But as a former journalist who always took deadlines seriously, I can’t help but view my ER visit as a wake-up call.
I’ve never made a bucket list of things to do and places to go before I head off to the Great Beyond. Now perhaps it’s time I did. And let’s not even think about all those phone calls I should return, emails I should reply to, and unpleasant household projects I have postponed.
As the title of a song popular in my parents’ heyday reminds me now with mordant glee, “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).”
Copyright © 2021 by Susan Hooper
