Free Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren Page A

Rich—high scorer on our synagogue’s basketball team, undefeated in singles through three years of varsity tennis at Erasmus, hard-hitting third baseman for the Tufts College baseball team, and a guy who helped put himself through college and medical school by winning substantial sums of money at poker—was a tough, fiery ballplayer, as competitive as any guy I knew. Though he had a most winning smile off the court, in the schoolyard he was all business—all elbows, hips, butt, and shoulders under the basket—a guy who would go through the proverbial brick wall after a loose ball—and, on the perimeter, a guy with a soft, deadly touch on his jump shot.
    Now, however, as I’ve been learning from conversations and letters, and from manuscripts he’s been sending me, though he still plays tennis regularly and competitively, he has mellowed in unforeseen ways. In his talks with me, and during our times together—in Massachusetts, Denver (where his two children live), and California—especially with his children, and when talking about his patients, he will be the most attentive and patient of listeners, the most thoughtful and gentle of men.
    In his life away from the hospital and medical school, in his home in Redondo Beach, he now devotes significant portions of each day to Buddhist meditation, to practicing piano (Chopin, Beethoven,Mozart, Schubert), and to that reading and writing by which he is attempting to understand what to him are the real, mysterious, and often mystical relationships of our minds to our bodies.
    A brilliant researcher and clinician who has authored several textbooks on cardiology, along with several hundred medical journal articles, and who pioneered studies in angiography, electrophysiology, and nuclear cardiology, in recent years Rich has become especially interested in those forces, beyond scientific measurement, that he believes frequently prove crucial in matters of life and death. He is, in fact, well along in the writing of a book that describes how many of his patients have lived on against all ordinary rules of medical diagnosis and prognosis—and how others are able, in what are for them most uncharacteristic ways, to come to peaceful accommodations with illness and with death.
    â€œRich urges me to call anytime, just to talk,” I write. “This is very important, he says. And explains to me why i am going to be okay—the really good news is that we have no localized damage to any part of the heart so far, it seems, and what we want to do most is to preverve as much of this muscle as possible.”
    Rich has become such a sweet new age type, for such a brilliant, formerly competitious Brooklyn boy: says he feels our reconnecting was meant to be…and this is why, etc…he has felt strange and definite sense of communion with me.
    After I talk with Rich—he is going to call people he knows as soon as we hang up, and I am to call him back that evening, 9:30 West Coast time—I telephone Jerry, Arthur, and Phil.
    Phil and Arthur say that they defer to Jerry and Rich, and Jerry suggests I come down to Yale-New Haven instead of Massachusetts General, where he can arrange things for me, and where I can stay over at his house before and after the angiogram. He says he will make calls to cardiologists he knows in both New Haven and Boston, and this is when I say to him—as I will to Rich when I call him back—that he and the other guys should just talk with one another and then tell me what to do.
    Sharon, a woman I have known for several years—we’d been friends, but within the past several months our relationship has becomeromantic—is supposed to come by for dinner, and our times together, our telephone conversations (she lives in Boston), and the warm, eager way we look forward to being together are, I tell myself, proof either that I am correct in my conviction that things are definitely over between me