Alcoholism isn’t the only progressive disease that I own and manage, or that manages me. I also live with early-onset coronary artery disease, and suffered my first heart attack when I was 33 years old. They placed a stent near the top of my right coronary artery (RCA), prescribed several pills to lower cholesterol, manage heart rate, lower blood pressure, and provide additional nutrients for my blood. They also recommended more exercise, a low-carb, low-fat diet, and directed me to give up nicotine in all its forms. For 25 years, I did those things, although it took several tries and many years to completely stop smoking and chewing. Along the way, I also stopped drinking alcohol, and began to practice The 12 Steps as a recovery pathway, stress manager, and guide to personal development and improvement. The 12 Steps, the diet, the focused exercise, all of it worked — until it didn’t.
Last Monday, October 2nd, I suffered my second heart attack. I had just completed a good (not great) workout — elliptical machine, core circuit, some light stretching — and was leaving the gym when I felt a steady twisting in my chest, like a hand squeezing me below the skin, stinging pain down both arms, and a sustained weakness in my legs. I was still sweating from my workout, but felt another wave of moisture hit. The whole complex passed before I could alert the gym attendant, so I drove home. Within five minutes of arriving, I was on the floor and shouting for my wife. Thanks God she was home, and that we made it to the ER quickly. Thank God, for the ER Staff who stabilized me, got me into an ambulance and to the nearest heart hospital. There, a team of cardiologists, nurses and technicians placed two new stents, and I was in a room, recuperating, before three full hours elapsed. Unfortunately, I needed a third stent, placed on Wednesday, but I was home watching playoff baseball by that evening, wondering just what the hell happened to me.
Hindsight is always 20/20, everything crystal clear, logical, precise, just a set of directions laying on the table, waiting to be followed. I lost some exercise capacity over the last year, but blamed it on unexplained weight gain; I seemed to need naps shortly after any intense workout, and those naps were often two hours of dead-to-the-world sleep, from which it was difficult to rise, clear my head, and reset for the day’s remaining obligations. I soaked my t-shirts walking the streets of Cincinnati, first, then London, and found myself breathing hard when I used to routinely run five miles or more. It felt like I had become much older very quickly, and that nothing I did food-wise or gym-wise was making any difference. But I was embarrassed to ask my doctors about it, given my recent history with them.
Both my primary care physician and my cardiologist were very comfortable with my bloodwork, the results of a recent stress test, and were politely insistent that I needed to lose an unspecified amount of weight (lets call it 20lbs). I’d had a lung scan, and a sonogram post-treadmill test, and was told that except for “advancing coronary artery disease,” everything looked GREAT! My exercise capacity, my heart’s response to stress, my cholesterol … everything was EXCELLENT! Until it wasn’t, last Monday, and we learn, collectively, that none of those strong results, that strong performance, the pills and miles run and desserts skipped and Skoal Long-Cut unchewed, none of it, prevented a new 90% blockage in my RCA and a 90% blockage in another, descending, artery behind my heart. As we say in Alcoholics Anonymous: my outsides did not match my insides, and I paid for it.
In 20/20 hindsight, I needed a nuclear stress test last year. I needed to tell my doctors that I was worried about my actual exercise capacity, out there on the streets and paths and in the pool. That I felt heavy, heavy fatigue most days. I might also have told them about the unmanageable stress in our lives, the sadness, fear and anger of William’s last year on Earth. His death. Unfortunately, we were also, and still are, juggling multiple, high-risk situations across the extended family, in our occupations, financially, the whole basket. The last 12 months were abnormal, dysfunctional, scary, sad and exhausting. In 20/20 hindsight, my AA Program wasn’t enough. I needed additional counseling and therapy a LONG time ago. But I was convinced that I had it all covered, that I was 10lbs away from feeling good again, that I could figure it out if I just read more, made more lists, and disengaged from the contradictory noise of professionals, whether medical, psychological, financial or spiritual. The story of my life, in a nutshell, and its going to kill me if I don’t change.
So, I will try again to change, and I will create Bogeman 3.0. I will tighten my diet, ramp back to my best exercise routine, beginning with Cardiac Rehabilitation. I will enhance my recovery, through 12 Step Practice, fellowship and service, augmented with regular visits to a counselor/therapist. I have a growing stack of poems to complete, still have novels I want to write, and have promised that I will use this site as a living journal. And I will be a good son, a better father, and the best husband I can be. No matter how many times I commit to those things, I always seem to fall short, always seem to let myself down while I am trying hard not to let anybody else down, not to drop any balls, miss any deadlines, or forget any nickels. It feels like I’ve been given more than my share of shots at this. I hope that means God is still working with me, and has more for me to do. I refuse to consider alternatives, today.
