Free Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren

reducing both heart disease and strokes. This property of aspirin was first noted in 1950 by Lawrence Craven, a family physician in Cleveland who, observing that giving aspirin to children following tonsil removal resulted in increased bleeding, suggested in a series of papers which, during his lifetime, went unnoticed that aspirin might also reduce the tendency of the blood to clot following coronary thrombosis.) *
    â€œI think it’s viral,” Dr. Flynn tells me again just before I leave.
    Back home ten minutes later, I telephone Dr. Flynn’s office andsay that Dr. Flynn said I should set up an appointment with Dr. Beck for an angiogram. The secretary tells me that Dr. Beck is booked for several weeks. I can make the appointment now, or call back. Although I am wild with anxiety and rage, I remain outwardly calm. Talking on the phone with a stranger who works for a doctor I have never seen, and feeling mildly panicked—if I let the anger fueled by my helplessness show, will they simply tell me to go to another doctor? will I have to go through the whole routine again?—I am persistent and insistent: I want an appointment as soon as possible. When the secretary looks through the schedule for a third time, she tells me she can squeeze me in for a brief office visit with Dr. Beck in the middle of next week—not for the angiogram, but to confer about setting up an appointment for an angiogram.
    I hang up and telephone Rich, who had called earlier and left a message asking me to call him as soon as I got home, and to have the doctor fax him the results of the exam right away. I go over what has happened, beginning with Dr. Flynn telling me, first thing, that I’ve already had a heart attack—and when I get to the end of the story and tell Rich that the last thing Dr. Flynn said to me was that he thinks the problem is viral, Rich explodes.
    â€œIt’s not viral, goddamnit —I want you in the hospital as soon as possible!” he exclaims, and he now insists I go to Massachusetts General Hospital, and not Bay State, because Massachusetts General is “the best” and because he knows several excellent cardiologists there. He will call ahead and help with arrangements. Catheterization is no big deal, he says, but if they have to go beyond catheterization and do angioplasties or a bypass, he wants me where he knows the doctors and knows they are “the best of the best”—the most experienced surgeons, the best diagnosticians.
    (“My medical antennae were tingling with that sense I always get when I know something’s terribly wrong,” Rich will later tell me. “My initial goal was to keep you from total panic while getting you to Mass General, and as time went by, my anxiety deepened—thus the more frequent calls. But I knew how serious the situation was, and there I was, three thousand miles away, agitated as hell. I knew the clock was ticking, and I knew where you could get the best help—two hours down the road.”)
    We talk for a long time, and Rich goes over everything with me carefully, continuing to insist that I go to Massachusetts General Hospital. He is concerned about my ongoing discomfort, but—to reassure me?—says that the fact that I have been able to swim so strongly is a good sign.
    â€œI want you to know I am here for you one hundred percent, Jay,” he says, but, alas, “here” is southern California, and what is imperative now is “to get the very best and most expeditious help” for me he can, and as soon as possible.
    He also talks about how fortuitous our reconnecting after many years apart has been, and about how much this has meant to him. (After having read Imagining Robert , Rich wrote me a long letter—not only about how moving he found the book, but also about how touched he was by our many affinities, and how close he felt—much like a brother—to me.)
    In my memory,