On a story assignment in France for the New York Times Magazine, Martha Weinman Lear has just escaped tourist-infested Cannes for a quiet pension in the hills behind the Riviera when she gets the call from New York. Her husband has suffered a massive heart attack and is in the hospital.
Harold Lear, a fifty-three-year-old urologist and leader in the field of human sexuality research, suddenly finds himself in the helpless role of the patient. Ripping into the Lears’ lives and marriage, Hal’s coronary disease sends them on a journey through New York City’s medical maze. With bittersweet poignancy, Lear chronicles her husband’s valiant efforts to combat his sickness as more heart attacks and devastating postsurgical complications befall him.
A stunning work of medical drama and journalism, Heartsounds is above all the gripping story of a passionate, enduring love.
On a story assignment in France for the New York Times Magazine, Martha Weinman Lear has just escaped tourist-infested Cannes for a quiet pension in the hills behind the Riviera when she gets the call from New York. Her husband has suffered a massive heart attack and is in the hospital.
Harold Lear, a fifty-three-year-old urologist and leader in the field of human sexuality research, suddenly finds himself in the helpless role of the patient. Ripping into the Lears’ lives and marriage, Hal’s coronary disease sends them on a journey through New York City’s medical maze. With bittersweet poignancy, Lear chronicles her husband’s valiant efforts to combat his sickness as more heart attacks and devastating postsurgical complications befall him.
A stunning work of medical drama and journalism, Heartsounds is above all the gripping story of a passionate, enduring love.
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Overview
On a story assignment in France for the New York Times Magazine, Martha Weinman Lear has just escaped tourist-infested Cannes for a quiet pension in the hills behind the Riviera when she gets the call from New York. Her husband has suffered a massive heart attack and is in the hospital.
Harold Lear, a fifty-three-year-old urologist and leader in the field of human sexuality research, suddenly finds himself in the helpless role of the patient. Ripping into the Lears’ lives and marriage, Hal’s coronary disease sends them on a journey through New York City’s medical maze. With bittersweet poignancy, Lear chronicles her husband’s valiant efforts to combat his sickness as more heart attacks and devastating postsurgical complications befall him.
A stunning work of medical drama and journalism, Heartsounds is above all the gripping story of a passionate, enduring love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497648371 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 748 |
| Sales rank: | 605,307 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Martha Weinman Lear is the author of Where Did I Leave My Glasses? as well as the bestsellers The Child Worshipers and Heartsounds, which became a Peabody Award–winning film. She is a former articles editor and staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and has written extensively for that and many other national publications, including AARP The Magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, GQ, House Beautiful, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Day, McCall’s, Family Circle, and Reader’s Digest, often on medical, cultural, and sociological subjects. She lives in New York City with her husband, screenwriter Albert Ruben.
Read an Excerpt
Heartsounds
The Story of a Love and Loss
By Martha Weinman Lear
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1980 Martha Weinman LearAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4837-1
CHAPTER 1
He awoke at 7 A.M. with pain in his chest. The sort of pain that might cause panic if one were not a doctor, as he was, and did not know, as he knew, that it was heartburn.
He went into the kitchen to get some Coke, whose secret syrups often relieve heartburn. The refrigerator door seemed heavy, and he noted that he was having trouble unscrewing the bottle cap. Finally he wrenched it off, cursing the defective cap. He poured some liquid, took a sip. The pain did not go away. Another sip; still no relief.
Now he grew more attentive. He stood motionless, observing symptoms. His breath was coming hard. He felt faint. He was sweating, though the August morning was still cool. He put fingers to his pulse. It was rapid and weak. A powerful burning sensation was beginning to spread through his chest, radiating upward into his throat. Into his arm? No. But the pain was growing worse. Now it was crushing —"crushing," just as it is always described. And worse even than the pain was the sensation of losing all power, a terrifying seepage of strength. He could feel the entire degenerative process accelerating. He was growing fainter, faster. The pulse was growing weaker, faster. He was sweating much more profusely now—a heavy, clammy sweat. He felt that the life juices were draining from his body. He felt that he was about to die.
On some level he stood aside and observed all this with a certain clinical detachment. Here, the preposterous spectacle of this thin naked man holding a tumbler of Coke and waiting to die in an orange Formica kitchen on a sunny summer morning in the fifty-third year of his life.
I'll be damned, he thought. I can't believe it.
It had crept up on him so sneakily. He had awakened earlier, at 6:30, with an ache, not a pain really, high up there in the pit of the stomach, and wondering what might have caused it, possibly the broiled-chicken snack at midnight, he had padded into the bathroom and had caught his reflection in the mirror: pallid under the tan, blue eyes dulled, the hollows beneath them deep and dark.
You look like hell, he had told himself. Go back to sleep. It's Saturday.
So he had gone back to bed, but not to sleep. It was a habit he could not break. Whether he had slept eight hours or two, alone or not, in his own bed or in some vacation spot five thousand miles from home; whether he had worked or boozed or counted his debts or fought with his wife or mourned a friend the night before; on weekends or on New Year's Day, with or without headaches, backaches, upper respiratories, whatever: even when he willed himself to linger in the bed and there was no reason at all not to do so, he was always up at 6:30, his own most reliable alarm clock, instantly alert, ready to wash, dress, gulp the coffee, scan the front page, drive to the hospital and appear at 8 A.M. in the operating room, scrubbed and ready to cut. A habit.
He had lain there thinking about this habit, and perhaps finally he had dozed for a few minutes, but then he had wakened again with the pain worse, and had gone for the Coke. And now he was at the edge of an abyss.
He made his way back to the bedroom, clutching walls for support. He eased himself onto the bed, picked up the telephone receiver and, with fingers that felt like foreign objects, dialed the Manhattan emergency number.
A woman's voice, twangy: "This is 911. Can I help you?"
He spoke slowly, struggling to enunciate each word clearly:
"My name is Dr. Harold Lear. I live at——. I am having a heart attack. My doctor's name is——. I am too weak to look up his number. Please call him and tell him to come right away."
"Sir, I'm sorry. This is 911. I can't call your doctor."
"But I need him."
"Well, I'm sorry. This is strictly an emergency service."
"This is an emergency. A heart attack."
"Sir, I'm very sorry." Reproach in the voice. "I can't call your doctor. We don't do that."
He thought he might laugh or cry. He felt trapped in an old Nichols and May routine: I think my arm is broken. Yes, sir, what is your Blue Cross number? I don't know. You don't know? Well, I don't have my card, but I have this arm, you see ... You don't have your card? You should always carry your card....
Now he felt not panic, but a certain professional urgency. A familiar statistic plucked at his brain like an advertising slogan: 50 percent of all coronary victims die in the first ten minutes. "Thank you," he said to 911, and hung up.
Slowly he tugged on a robe, staggered back into the foyer and pressed for the elevator. At this hour it was on self-service. When it arrived, he entered, pushed 1 and CLOSE DOOR, and braced himself against the wall. Suddenly he knew that if he did not lie down he would fall. He lowered himself to the floor. When the elevator door opened, he rolled out into the lobby and said to the startled doorman, "Get a wheelchair. Get me to the emergency room. I am having a heart attack."
"An ambulance, Doctor? Shouldn't we get an ambulance?"
"No. No time. A wheelchair." Then he lost clarity.
He was next aware of being in a wheelchair that was careening down the street. His head was way back, resting against a softness that seemed to be a belly. He did not know whose it was, but he was so pleased to have that belly for support.
The hospital—his hospital, where he was on staff—was nearby, a few blocks from his home. He felt the wheelchair take a corner with a wild side-to-side lurch and go rattling on toward the emergency room. Though his mind was floating and he could not keep his eyes open, that curiously disengaged observer within him reached automatically for the pulse. He could no longer detect any beat. He was very cold, very clammy, and he knew that he was in shock.
I am dying now, he thought. I am dying in a creaky wheelchair that is rattling down the avenue, half a block from the emergency room. Isn't this silly. And then: Well, if I am dying, why isn't my life flashing in front of me? Nothing is flashing. Where is my life?
The apartment-house doorman, who was steering the wheelchair, and a janitor, who was running alongside, recalled later that he was smiling. They wondered why.
Finally the chair screeched to a halt. He opened his eyes. Crutches, pulleys, traction, all the paraphernalia of an orthopedic treatment room. Damn it, he thought, we've come to the wrong place. A uniformed security guard stood nearby, eyeing him idly. "Excuse me," he said to the guard, "but I am having a heart attack. Can you direct us to the right room?" And slipped out of consciousness again.
Then, dimly, he felt himself being lifted onto a stretcher, sensed noise and light and a sudden commotion about him. They were giving him nasal oxygen, taking his pulse, taking his blood pressure, starting an intravenous, getting a cardiogram—the total force of modern emergency care suddenly mobilized; a team clicking away with the impersonality of an overwhelmingly efficient machine.
He understood that at this moment he was no more than a body with pathology. They were not treating a person; they were treating an acute coronary case in severe shock. They were racing, very quickly, against time. He himself had run this race so often, working in just this detached silent way on nameless, faceless bodies with pathologies. He did not resent the impersonality. He simply noted it. But one of the medical team, a young woman who was taking his blood pressure, seemed concerned about him. She patted him on the shoulder. She said, "How do you feel?" It was the only departure from this cool efficiency, and he felt achingly grateful for it. Ah, he thought in some fogged corner of the brain, she must be a medical student. She hasn't yet learned to depersonalize. She will. We all do. What a pity.
(Later—he thought it was that same day, but it may have been the next—she came up to the coronary-care unit, and took his hand and said, "How are you doing, Dr. Lear?" and smiled at him. He never knew her name, and he never forgot her.)
The painkillers had taken effect now. He could breathe. A whitecoated figure said, "Well, there's no question about your having a heart attack."
What a dumb way to put it, he thought. I don't know what he's saying, "What do you mean, 'no question'? Did I or didn't I?"
"You did. Look." The doctor, clearly irritated, thrust the cardiogram reading in front of his face. He peered at it. The fine ink lines traced a crazy path across the paper tape. Groggy as he was, he could see that he was having one hell of a heart attack.
Now administrative forces descended upon him. They asked about next-of-kin.
His wife was out of the country, he said.
Where?
He wasn't sure.
Children?
His son was traveling too. He could not remember his daughter's married name.
Siblings? None. Parents? None. Finally he gave them the name of a friend.
His own doctor was abroad. The covering doctor was a stranger to him. "Whom do you want?" they asked. He couldn't think of anyone else. This seemed to rattle them. He could not simply be admitted; he had to have an admitting doctor. They conferred for what seemed like a very long time while he lay there, feeling agreeably hazy, bittersweet strains of Nichols and May playing again in his ear. Finally they sent him upstairs, doctorless.
He remembered thinking, just before he passed into a long, deep sleep, How can I get hold of Martha? I've got to get hold of Martha, because if I die without telling her, she will never forgive me.
He knew this was the logic of a deranged mind. A nurse wondered, as his street escorts had wondered earlier, why he was smiling.
CHAPTER 2"Mild?" I screamed, for the overseas connection was dreadful. "Did you say 'mild'?"
"No, I did not say 'mild.' I said 'myo.'" The voice muffled but smooth, cool; these strange phrases as easy as butter on his tongue. "Your husband has suffered a myocardial infarction." Pause. "A massive myocardial infarction."
Massive. I hadn't been prepared for that.
The first call had come, just an hour before, from the Paris bureau of The New York Times. No one else would have known where to reach me. Two days earlier I had fled a tourist-choked Cannes, driven up into the hills behind the Riviera and found a pension in a mountain village named Magagnosc. The place was small and quiet, not crawling with couples, and I found comfort in the fact that the proprietors called me by name. I had informed the Times people of my move, for we were trying to set up an interview with Simone de Beauvoir and were in daily contact.
"Lewis Bergman would like you to call him right away," a secretary from the Paris bureau had said. Bergman was then the editor of the Times Sunday Magazine, and a close friend.
"Oh? What's it about?"
"I don't know. This is the telephone number."
I knew the number: his home telephone in New York. Instantly I began floating, on waves of adrenaline, toward the Wailing Wall. This happens so easily. It is in the blood, this readiness for hysteria that gets passed down from mother to daughter like the family silver. Our cultural heritage: sons inherit obsessiveness; daughters inherit hysteria. Bergman, calling Paris to reach me from his home? On a Saturday? This was no business call. Hal was dead. Or had had a heart attack. There were no other possibilities.
Still, I had tried to pretend that there were others. Wait, now, I lectured myself. Don't hurry to call him. Prove to yourself that this is not necessarily a crisis. Think reasonable thoughts. Think that Bergman wants me to do a rush assignment. Think that he wants to say hello. Think that he wants to discuss some questions to put to de Beauvoir, questions that simply happened to occur to him on a Saturday, at home....
Tell me, Mlle. de Beauvoir, do you feel as strong and independent as you sound? Do you really have it all that together? Do you ever feel lonely? Did you ever want to marry Sartre? No, no, not as a bourgeois gesture, but to ... you understand ... to formalize your commitment? Do you think about how life would be without him? Do you sit around worrying about whether he's going to have a heart attack? Do you ...
So I sat quietly on the bed for fifteen interminable minutes, considering other possibilities, and then I went to the telephone to confirm what I absolutely knew.
Bergman, with such a harsh message to deliver, sounded nervous. "Now, look, Martha, don't get nervous, it's just that Hal is feeling a little sick...."
"He's dead?" Oh, galloping now toward the Wailing Wall.
"Dead! Good heavens, no, of course he's not dead. He's just had this little ..."
"He's had a heart attack?"
"Well, sort of. Yes. But it's nothing much, it's just this little ..."
"Oh, God. You're sure he's not dead?"
"Of course he's not dead. I tell you he's fine. I saw him this afternoon. He was bitching because he can't make our tennis date tomorrow." He laughed leadenly. Much later, I learned what this call and that hospital visit had cost him. My husband, lying in an intensive care unit at the mercy of his own heart, had nonetheless been trying to figure how to get the news to me with least trauma. In some narcotic-fogged corner of his mind, it had seemed logical that if I got the call from Bergman, I would assume it was a business matter and not be frightened. So Bergman, who had lost his dearest friends to coronaries in the past several years, had been summoned to the bedside of yet another friend who lay hovering on the brink. The two men were not that close. But still, what a wrench in such moments, what a fearsome thing! To be American, male, in one's fifties, a compulsive worker—as who of them is not?—worried about cholesterol and unpaid bills, working under stress and watching old friends succumb, one by one, to that crisis of the heart ... I do not suppose women can fully understand that fear. Not that particular one. We agonize instead over cancer; we take as a personal threat the lump in every friend's breast.
"I'll get the next plane home," I said.
"There's no hurry. I mean, I think it would be a good idea, but Hal said to be sure to tell you that there's no hurry."
"No hurry! My God, he may be dying and there's no hurry."
"Now, look, I told you he's bitching about the tennis. Don't go to pieces, for Christ's sake ..."
But of course I went quite to pieces. Monsieur and Madame, the proprietors of my little pension, were in the kitchen. I went to them, stuttering, unable to make sense.
"Mon mari. Un coup de coeur," I cried, striking my chest with a fist.
They stared uncomprehendingly. I didn't know how to get through. I kept striking my chest. "Mon mari, malade, ici," I cried, and finally they seemed to understand. They petted me. They made sounds of comfort. Some phrases I understood: It happens to many doctors. They work too hard, n'est-ce pas? Now that he has a warning, he will work less hard. He will recover and live long. And so forth, trying their best.
We then called the hospital—Monsieur yelling, "Urgent! Urgent!" but still it took forever. Finally a voice, blurred but unmistakably Brooklynese: "Good evening,———Hospital."
I screamed that I wanted information about Dr. Lear. Immediately I was off on my own Nichols and May trip. Dr. Lear, the voice said; was he on staff or a patient? A patient, I yelled. His room number? I don't know. Just a moment, then, we'll transfer you to Information....
"Don't cut me off!" I shouted, for I knew these hospital switchboards. "I'm calling from France...."
The Brooklyn voice again, injured: "I'm not cutting you awf, lady."
Another voice: "Good evening, Maternity...."
"Oh, please, no. My husband, his name is Dr. Lear, he's had a heart attack."
"A heart attack? Oh, well, then, he wouldn't be in Maternity. Just a moment, we'll try to switch you...."
Then I heard a third voice say: "Dr. Lear? Oh, yes, he's in Coronary Care. Hold on...." And finally, now, here was the resident on duty, telling me something about a massive myocardial infarction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Heartsounds by Martha Weinman Lear. Copyright © 1980 Martha Weinman Lear. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover
- Praise for Heartsounds
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Part One
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Part Two
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28
- Chapter 29
- Afterword
- About the Author
- Copyright