Free Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren Page B

and Ellen—or that I am more profoundly shallow than I care to know. Not for nothing, I remind myself, am I in these matters, as my friends keep telling me, perhaps the world’s oldest living teenager.
    Ellen calls, and during our conversation, I tell her about what happened at Dr. Flynn’s office. When she asks if I would be willing to have lunch with her the next day, I say no—that I don’t think it would be a good idea (for me); when she asks if there is anything she can do for me, I say no again, that there isn’t.
    Shortly after I hang up, Dr. Katz calls and tells me he has spoken with Dr. Flynn. “david katz v concerned,” I write. “Says he is surprised and shocked, really, think he may feel he missed this some [by] not thinking coronary disease for a few weeks.”
    â€œWell,” I comment. “He is human too,” and add: “so are we all so are we all.”

5
    Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Times Five
    W HY IS IT , I wonder in the hours following the exams in Dr. Flynn’s office and at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, that some people who smoke and drink at will, eat whatever they want and in great quantities, live under large and constant pressures, never exercise, and are obese, live to ripe old ages in good health and without loss of faculties, while others, who do all those things touted as leading to long and healthy lives, suddenly find themselves cut down in the prime of life?
    The answer to the age-old question—“Why me?”—I remind myself as I walk from room to room in my house, wondering how and when I will give the news to my children, seems the same as it has always been: “Why not you?”
    I think too of my father’s prescription for longevity: If you drink a malted every day for ninety-nine years, he used to tell me, you’ll live to be very old.
    Sharon arrives late in the afternoon, and though we have planned to go out for dinner, we never leave my house. Sharon’s mother, living alone in a small town near the Connecticut border an hour west, is quite ill, and Sharon tells me she will probably need to spend the night there.
    We sit on the couch in my living room for a while, messingaround—kissing, talking, playing—and then I make supper. Several times I start to talk about what happened earlier in the day, but stop each time, afraid that if I give Sharon the news, it will frighten her away, and while we eat, I find myself recalling the time, less than two months before my nineteenth birthday, I was operated on for what I would learn, many years later, was Hodgkin’s disease.
    Near the end of my sophomore year at Columbia, I noticed that some swollen glands in my neck were not going away, and one Sunday afternoon while visiting my cousin Leatrice, a doctor then doing her residency in pediatrics, I asked her to feel them. She told me to get myself to the Columbia Health Services, located in St. Luke’s Hospital, the next day. After classes the following afternoon, I walked across the street to the Health Services, where a young doctor felt my glands, and then called in an older doctor. The older doctor examined me, told me he wanted me in the hospital on Friday for a biopsy, and that I should plan on staying overnight.
    At the time I didn’t know what a biopsy was—I thought it was probably some kind of test to see why my glands remained swollen. When I arrived home, in Brooklyn, I told my mother I’d be going to St. Luke’s on Friday for a biopsy, and that I might have to stay overnight. After my father arrived from work, my mother drew him into their bedroom, where, behind closed doors, they shouted, wept, and argued. Within a day, my mother, a registered nurse, had arranged for the biopsy to be performed, not at St. Luke’s, but by a doctor she knew at a hospital in Brooklyn.
    A week later, the doctor operated on me, took out all the glands he could reach— stripped them, in