The Angina Monologue

So, as near as I can tell, I've been running on piss and vinegar, caffeine and whiskey for the last few years. Blood had nothing to do with it.
     Finally, after a week of hanging from an aluminum step ladder, a ratchet and socket in one hand and my chest in the other, saying things like, "Damn! The pollen is terrible this year!" and "Do you think I might have the flu?" Maggie dragged me to our doctor who shook his head and said, "It's not pollen, it's not the flu...it's you're heart, and you're going to the hospital....but you knew that."
     A trip to the hospital riding backwards in an ambulance, chatting about ADD with the EMT, a faster-than-life trip through prep to the operating room, where I heard someone say, "he's having a heart attack," and finally it dawned on me.
     I was having a heart attack. I found out from the doctor later that I'd probably had another one the day before.
     Three stents needed to hold open the big artery. It was totally blocked, the others only about 70 percent. I'm a Southern boy....I salt food before tasting it, then I add more salt. I like late nights and early risings, and when I'm working on a book I have no sense at all. Night and day, weekdays and weekends, they're all a blur to me.

     The week before my ‘surprise' heart attack, as I just happened to be reading about clues to my ragged health online, I discovered I had the symptoms of Angina. Maggie and I laughed about me having an angina, and she said mine must be a Mangina. Still, I made no connection to those puzzle pieces and a heart attack.
     That's called denial.
     My dad died at 47 of a heart attack, we have heart disease on both sides of the family and I had rheumatic fever as a child.
     So why would I suspect it could be my heart?
     A week of learning in the hospital, from the startling discovery that Mrs. Dash might've been in construction or law enforcement, but she damned sure wasn't a cook, to the taste of unsalted food. What ever tempted the mysterious Mrs. Dash to put so many mismatched and bland spices into a single bottle?
     I'll never know, but the same hour I got home from the hospital, as Maggie dashed out to get prescriptions filled, I began experimenting with spices - New Mexico red chile powder, garlic, curry, finely ground almonds, thyme and rosemary. From there I developed an even half-dozen blends that allowed me to still cook and eat fine foods. Without salt.
     Life is good. 
  
     And this brings me to my latest blog thought, ‘Write What You Know.'
     In my novels, I've tried to write what I know, though what I know doesn't include gunfights, being famous in New York City or, in a YA book I wrote (in some drawer, somewhere), how it feels to walk on clouds.
     We can get our readers to suspend their disbelief as long as we don't jar their thoughts with inconsistencies. I now know how to write about having a heart attack. It's nothing like I thought it would be. When I hear someone had one, it sounds so dramatic, but the truth is (at least in my case) there's no drama, and the one being attacked by his heart is more a spectator than a participant.
     I still remember a scene from a Harold Robbins novel I read in high school. It was called A Stone For Danny Fisher. Danny was a fairly complicated and despicable man, and Robbins, though loathed in ‘literary' circles, could tell a pretty good story.
     Danny dies at the end, and the scene describing his death has him floating above the scene, mildly curious about what was happening to his body, and totally calm. That's what my heart attack felt like.
     I included an homage to that novel in my first book, A Thousand Bridges, in a scene where Mac comes very close to death. Elisabeth Kubler Ross mentioned this phenomenon in her great book, On Death and Dying.
     We need to try as hard as possible to get things right in fiction. The same laws apply there as they do in non-fiction. I take great leaps of faith in my storytelling, sometimes. When I do, I try hard to get someone besides myself to sign off on it. I'm a Vietnam veteran who didn't have to fight. But I have good friends who did, and I'm known to call them late at night to ask what seems to be simple questions (to them). To me, I can't stand the idea that one of my stories, ‘after' publication, contains some terrible mistake written in ignorance with no chance to correct it.
     I mean that. I think of it as I write, get compulsive about it when I edit. The things we don't know that we don't know. They keep me up nights (calling old friends with simple questions).
    
     As far as writing what I know, I know I almost died without finishing all the things I want to do. Writing isn't at the top of that list, but it's close.
     I'll be back.