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tty year, full stop. My mom had a stroke in March, in April I lost a small local election when I ran city councilperson, and then my husband put the icing on the cake in November when he came home from work one day and said, “I’ve been having some pains in my chest, so I just went to the doctor and he ran some tests.”
Turned out those tests involved one for a chemical the heart emits after heart attacks, and it was positive. The day after that announcement my 42-year-old husband had a cardiac stent placed, and while the doctor inserted it, my husband had another heart attack.
It was scary as hell, particularly during the whole heart attack bit, when a very nice but somewhat worried looking nurse informed me that they had to transfer my husband — while he was having a heart attack — to a hospital across town, so they could do a heart bypass surgery. But then, suddenly, it got better: the same nurse came back, looking slightly less worried (God love nurses with honest faces), and said the doctor had been able to get a stent placed in my husband’s artery, the heart attack had stopped, and bypass surgery would not be necessary.
Two days after that my husband came home with a lot of new medications — all the more surprising because up to then, he’d been on no medications and we’d had no idea he had coronary artery disease — and some big bruises on his wrists and in his groin where the doctor had inserted the arterial catheters.
But: he came home.

I knew then, and I know now, that there were other ways this little story could have ended.
Two years later, we’re still feeling really lucky. My husband has regular check-ups; when you take lots of heart, blood pressure, and cholesterol meds, it turns out they want to check your other organs frequently to make sure the medications aren’t affecting them adversely. All of his numbers have been good. He has never been overweight, and we have always tried to eat a healthy diet, but we have implemented whatever diet changes we could (lots of salmon, sardines, brown rice instead of white, soy milk in the place of dairy and no cheese). He works out or lifts weights every day.
He has never complained about any of that.

Or, I should say, he has never verbally complained. The first time we ordered takeout pizza without cheese for him, his eyes were a little sad. He really loved regular pizza.
And then a few weeks ago, while running, he thought he felt a bit of a tightness in his chest. And maybe a bit of muscle pain in his left arm.
You know if you know anyone with heart problems, the minute they say anything about their left side, you go into high alert.
My husband did say these symptoms didn’t feel exactly like the symptoms he’d had two years ago, that had sent him to the doctor then. He actually can’t figure out if it’s the same kind of pain, or if it’s standard chest and muscle tightness because he hasn’t been able to do as much true cardio as he’d like (we didn’t feel he could go to his regular gym this past year), and it’s not consistent. He also worries that he’s on high alert, hyper-aware of every last little bodily sensation.
I asked him to write a quick question to his doctor anyway.
He did, and in a couple of days he’s going in for a nuclear stress test, where they’ll inject some radioactive dye into his bloodstream and make him run on a treadmill. We’ll see what we learn.
Now, I don’t want to be over-dramatic. This is one of those situations where, if you talk to any other people or ever scan Internet health chats or question threads, you realize that, if everyone chucked their problems in the middle, you’d probably still grab your own problem back and feel thankful you don’t have it any worse.
Still.

In 2019, after my husband came home from the ho

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