The Heart Of The Matter

My mother acquired a heart condition when she was very young, probably from a bout with Scarlet Fever. Or it might have been congenital, we'll never know for sure. Her ticker never worked quite right, and it harbored a sinister clot that was like a ticking time-bomb for many years.

One night in 1972 my mom was in the kitchen getting ice cream for me, just the way I liked it back then, vanilla sprinkled with Quik chocolate milk powder. I know, crazy.

Anyhow, as she walked across the floor, she suddenly collapsed. I remember seeing her lying on the floor, eyes rolled up in her head, completely white.

The commotion that followed can only be described as seeming like the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan". Everything seemed simultaneously dreamy and jittery. Sounds were muffled. Individual frames still hang in my view, suspended in time.

I heard one of my older brothers pick up the phone and tell another one of my brothers to get off it, NOW!. He then called the paramedics.

Brian and I, 7 and 5, were ushered into our bedroom and the door was closed. I freaked out. I didn't know what to think. I remember feeling sheer panic gripping me like an icy hand. When we came out of our room to the sound of fading sirens, my mom was gone, taken to the hospital.

Her little time-bomb had exploded, the clot that was in her heart had come loose and gone to her brain. It's called an embolism.

My mother was put on blood thinners and made it through with effects on the left side of her body like a stroke, it was some time before she recovered the majority of her function. She never got it all back.

My parents decided that Brian and I needed to go away for a while while mom recovered. We were sent to my aunt and uncle's house in Cascade Township, near Grand Rapids. It was a terribly scary thing for us to go through, and I didn't understand why we couldn't just be with our mom. My aunt was much more strict than my mother was, and she got especially mad when her gourmet dinners were not eaten. I just wasn't into pasta primavera back then, unfortunately for me.

Needless to say, I missed a lot of desserts.

I started second grade in Cascade, and Brian and I had to take the bus. This was something we had never done before, we lived close to school at home. I remember the first day clearly, standing in a crowd of hundreds of kids outside the school. The bell rang and the kids scattered like frightened cockroaches. Very soon I was alone in the playground, wondering where I should go.

I entered the school and walked down the empty halls until I found the office and they got me to the proper classroom.

Finding the right bus after school was always challenging. After all, they were all big and yellow, their sole differentiating feature was a tiny number painted on the front fender. Brian came from a different class and I always checked carefully to make sure he was on the bus with me.

One day he wasn't there.

I got off the bus at home and my aunt was very mad that my brother wasn't with me. She didn't want to lose one of us on her watch. He had gotten on some other bus and after the driver had delivered all his pasty-faced passengers to their appropriate homes, there sat Brian in the back. The driver called to him and asked where he lived.

Brian said "Detroit".

He was delivered to my aunt's house quite a while after dark that day.

I had my first bad case of puppy-love in Cascade. A girl in my class named Elizabeth. She was blonde and tall and skinny and very athletic. I thought she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen, and I wanted to marry her.

Long before that could happen, we were sent back home.

Some years later my mom collapsed again at a local Chinese restaurant. it was discovered that her mitral valve was failing, and it's inefficiency was causing extreme tiredness, dizziness, and other effects. She would need open heart surgery to replace that bad valve. Such operations were not yet commonplace back in the 70's, but she really needed it.

So it was that my mom checked in to Harper Hospital one day and checked out some time later with a brand new mitral valve from a pig (they have very similar heart geometry). Although the doctors had some difficulty restarting her heart, she came out of it much improved. It took a long time for her to recover, her ribs and sternum hurt very badly. She had a little bell she would ring when she needed something. Sneezing was pure torture on her.

I used to joke with her that she would start "oinking", now that she was part pig :)

My mother's journey through life was often hijacked by her bad heart. The pig valve outlasted it's promised 10-year lifespan, ticking away until 1991 when my mother got her second valve replacement. No pigs were harmed this time around, her new valve was a high-tech carbon-fiber design made to last 50 years.

That's 40 years longer than my mom was made to last.