Afraid of our own hearts
Continuing adventures in open-heart surgery
When I checked in at the cardiac center, the receptionist studied my paperwork. She looked to be in her fifties, frizzy hair framing bottle-thick glasses.
“Hold on,” she said. “Are you related to Nicholas Daniloff?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s my dad. Was my… he died last year.”
Her face softened, eyes wide behind her magnified lenses.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I had him at Northeastern.”
Before I could even sit down, she came around the desk and wrapped me in a hug.
“When I saw your name, I thought, it couldn’t be. He was one of my favorite professors. Back in the nineties. I ended up dropping out, but I never forgot him. My name is Lucy.”
It stopped me cold.
Pa keeps reappearing.
Sometimes it’s an old man walking along the Charles with his hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes one of his turns of phrase slips out of my own mouth. Sometimes it’s a stranger who remembers sitting in one of his classrooms thirty-five years ago.
I told her I’d bring in a copy of my dad’s book about covering the former Soviet Union. Lucy hugged me again (as she would at most of my check-ins) before pointing me toward cardiac rehab.
An auspicious beginning.
The rehab room held a handful of treadmills, stationary bikes, and an elliptical machine. A pudgy man with matted gray hair plucked a pair of tiny dumbbells from a rack of colorful weights that stood in a corner. Behind him a mess of resistance ropes hung on hooks like a swarm of eels. The Price Is Right played on mute on a giant television in another corner while Elton John drifted through the speakers. An elderly woman in jeans slowly pedaled a recombinant bike.
It had been seven weeks since surgery and I was walking 8,000 steps a day and climbing the stairs at home without much trouble. I was already studying return-to-run programs. I wasn’t sure I really needed cardiac rehab. I’d spent decades running, racing, and staying fit. I was relatively young. My cardiologist had encouraged me to go, telling me “you’ll fly through it.” Four weeks, I figured. Six tops.
A physical therapist named Andi led me into a small side room and asked about my procedure and fitness history. She nodded approvingly as I described my routine — daily walks, the stairs at home, some light weights. Then she asked about my goals. “Falmouth Road Race in four months,” I said. “A marathon within a year.”
I leaned back in my chair, waiting for her eyes to light up. I imagined she didn’t hear those kinds of ambitions very often. She kept scribbling.
Probably too stunned, I figured.
Andi handed me a laminated workout card with exercises at various stations. “No treadmill?” I frowned. That was the whole reason I was here. Hadn’t she been listening?
“Soon. Let’s see how you do with these exercises.”
“What’s a bio-step?” I said scanning the card.
Andi pointed to some kind of seated stepping machine. “It’s like climbing stairs,” she said. “But you’re sitting down.” Then she showed me how to attach the EKG leads to my chest, wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around my arm, and pointed to a monitor above the therapists’ station where my jagged heart rhythms flickered in green beside a number they wanted to keep under 150.
Around me, an elderly woman snaked leads beneath her shirt then adjusted the pouch around her neck that held the transmitter. A middle aged man weighed himself on an old school medical scale, sliding the poise across the notched beam. Another man with thinning hair and a surgical mask pedaled the arm cycle before disappearing into the nurse’s office to lie down. Not everyone here had survived open-heart surgery. Some were recovering from heart attacks or stents. Others from dangerous arrhythmias or heart failure.
Deflated, I took my card and climbed onto the stationary bike. I quietly turned the resistance a few notches above the prescribed setting. Take that! I watched my heart rate climb on the monitor. I pushed above 100, 110, 120. I felt a few beads of sweat bud on my forehead. For weeks, my body had belonged to surgeons, nurses, and restrictions. Now, little by little, it would be returned to its rightful owner.
~ ~ ~
By my second week, it was clear I was one of the younger people in the room.
Davey, a retiree, often arrived in a heavy flannel shirt, oversized sweats, and velcro Reeboks. Sue, a squat, elderly woman walked the treadmill in a large T shirt and loose pants. There were a few other middle aged folks, but only one young patient. Clark. He looked to be in his late twenties. Gliding up and down on the elliptical machine, he told me his aneurysm had grown to 7.5 centimeters (about the size of a Sumo orange for those following the dilation fruit chart; as a reminder, mine was between a lemon and a regular orange). He dissected while he was playing softball on the Harvard fields with some buddies.
“I remember thinking something wasn’t right,” he said. “It felt… wet.”
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Wet.
I’d never heard anyone describe a dissection that way. But I can see how that makes sense. Blood forces its way between the layers of the aorta, threatening to rupture the vessel or cut off blood flow to the body (what would happen to Lindsey Graham the following July). Within hours, Clark was on the operating table. By the time we met, he’d been in cardiac rehab for five months. Five months. My heart sank. When I asked what operation he’d had, he shrugged.
“They replaced a part,” he said. “I’m not sure what they did exactly. I just trust they got it all fixed.”
Clark’s answer surprised me. I’d spent weeks obsessing over measurements, valve sizes, grafts, operative reports, pathology findings, survival statistics. I wanted to understand every stitch inside my chest. Clark didn’t need to know. His catastrophe had arrived without warning. Mine came with weeks to prepare. For him, the only fact that mattered was that he was alive. He had his whole life ahead of him. Why dwell in the sausage factory? I wasn’t sure whether that made him healthier — or me sicker.
The following week they played “Pomp and Circumstance” over the speakers and handed him a laminated certificate of completion. Then he was gone. Others disappeared that way, too. One week they were beside me on the biostep. The next they’d quietly returned to their lives.
~ ~ ~
Eventually, Andi kept her promise. One minute. That was all. Sixty seconds at a fourteen-minute pace, followed by two minutes of walking. Five intervals. Three-quarters of a mile. The longest I’d run in six months. It felt every bit as satisfying as finishing a marathon.
As I built from one minute to two, then three, I found myself thinking less about return-to-run plans than about who I had become. Or maybe who I’d spent my life trying to become. The sober runner. The marathoner chasing his father’s PR. The ultra runner. Every few years there had been another version of myself to chase. The vegan runner. The minimalist runner. The trail runner who disappeared into the woods with his dog.
The runner who spent a lot of time in physical therapy.
Now I was the comeback runner, logging fourteen-minute miles with walk breaks — something that once would have felt like failure, or at least surrender.
I was still a runner. Just not the runner I’d spent decades trying to become. I kept changing, eluding my own grasp, each version of me eventually giving way to another.
Maybe, for the first time, I needed to stop chasing some future version of myself. Maybe that was the gift of starting over: the chance to be a beginner again.
The confused overweight lug who shuffled along a dirt road in Vermont in the pre-dawn blackness to a soundtrack of cicadas and coyotes, watching out for flattened frogs and gravel stones the size of baby shoes, and whose finish line was the sunrise over the Green Mountains. Something I could never reach, only admire. Back when distant light was all I needed.
~ ~ ~
The first month passed. Then the second. Then the third. I kept coming. Somewhere along the way, the room changed. Or maybe I did.
The people I’d mentally grouped together as “the old folks” became Joe, who never missed a session and loved Aruba. The short woman in the oversized shirt turned out to be Carol, who gushed about her little dogs. Andi would stand on the neighboring treadmill to take my blood pressure while I ran, smile, and announce “140 over 70. Looking good.”
Lucy kept doling out hugs. She connected me with another patient she’d befriended: a 90-year-old retired CIA officer who’d worked in Eastern Europe. She thought I’d enjoy him given my dad’s history in the Soviet Bloc. He was affable and sharp. We talked about spy stuff including a cane he’d kept that was designed to slice open a man’s neck if it came down to it.
The television still played The Price Is Right, American Ninja Warrior and Family Feud. Elton John and Michael Jackson still drifted through the speakers. Every few weeks another patient graduated to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” while someone new arrived looking uncertain, clutching paperwork just as I once had. The room had become its own small hothouse of hope and determination. None of us had chosen to be there. None of us wanted to stay. But for a little while, we shared something almost no one else in our lives could fully understand. We knew what it felt like to be afraid of our own hearts.
By the fourth month, I was sweating so much the EKG leads kept sliding off my chest. Andi would laugh, hand me a fresh set. Week after week it kept happening. Usually during a run. The irony wasn’t lost on me. When I arrived, I’d seen the leads as proof that I was still a patient. Tethered. Now they kept popping off and blanking out the wall monitor.
On my final day, they played “Pomp and Circumstance” and put a certificate in my hand. I thanked everyone by name. “Send us pictures from Falmouth,” Andi said. Then I walked out the same doors I’d entered four months earlier, getting a last embrace from Lucy. I realized I was going to miss this place. Not because I needed cardiac rehab anymore. Because, somewhere between the hugs, the treadmills, the blood pressure cuffs, and those slippery EKG leads, I’d found something I’d needed.
Not simply stronger legs. A steadier heart.
~ ~ ~
A few weeks later, on one of my runs, I spotted a lone dark sock in the middle of the bike path. Had it escaped from a dryer? As I got closer, I saw it was actually a dead rat.
He lay splayed on the pavement, gray body twisted as though he’d dived for something, forelegs stretched straight ahead, tail trailing behind. Beneath his head was a tiny pool of blood, no bigger than a dime. Clipped by a bike? Dropped by a hawk?
I glanced at my Garmin and kept going. My fifteen-minute interval had started. My heart rate climbed into the 160s. Andi said to keep under 180 for Falmouth. I looked again: 165.
A pair of cyclists approached in the distance. I looked back at the rat.
I hated the thought of that little guy being run over again, flattened beneath unsuspecting wheels. I trotted back and found a stick. I nudged his stiff little body onto the strip of grass beside the path, tucking him beneath the wooden guardrail. A discarded Dunkin’ napkin became a shroud. I weighed it down with the stick.
I stood there for a moment as the cyclists whizzed past.
Then I resumed my run. I’d forgotten to stop my watch. I no longer knew where I was in the workout. No longer aware of my heart rate.
A few days later, I passed the spot again. He was gone. No stick. No napkin. I imagined a couple of his rat buddies late at night tiptoeing across the path, and bearing him down the embankment for a proper goodbye.
I smiled. Then kept going.
