They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat Read online

  I called for a nurse and told her to take my balloons over and give them to the little girl. I don’t deserve any applause for that. I should have thought of it earlier. Little girls with frightened and lonely eyes and bright, bouncing balloons deserve to be together.

  9

  Heart II

  Six days after my heart surgery, I was released from the hospital. Six days. Give it another ten years and they might have patients in for surgery in the morning and home in time for the evening news. The next time somebody asks me for a donation to the heart fund, I’m going to think about that and dig a little deeper.

  (My total bill was somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000, of which I had to pay very little because I had insurance. The next time you curse your insurance payments, think about that.)

  I dressed myself in preparation to leave the hospital. Most everybody had caught on to my whining act by then.

  One of the doctors gave me some last minute instructions. He told me to wait two weeks before I had sex and six weeks before I drove a car. Or was it the other way around? I was still a little foggy and the entire discussion confused me, so I just promised him that I wouldn’t drive and have sex at the same time and let it go at that.

  He told me not to lift anything heavy. I made him put that in writing.

  I asked about tennis.

  “Six weeks,” he said, “and then start very slowly and don’t try to hit any serves or overheads until thee months. I don’t want you tearing the wires out of your sternum.”

  “How well do you think I can play tennis after this surgery?” I asked the doctor.

  “How well did you play before?” he asked me back.

  Somehow, I knew he was going to say that.

  The doctor also told me to take daily walks and to go to bed early at night and to avoid drinking a great deal of alcohol.

  “What would you consider the maximum number of beers I should drink a day?” I inquired.

  “Two,” said the doctor.

  “Draught okay?”

  “Draught is fine.”

  As it turned out, I wasn’t nearly as foggy as I had thought.

  They rolled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair. I said I could walk, but they insisted I take the wheelchair. A photographer from my newspaper came to take a picture of me leaving the hospital. I waved to him from the wheelchair. It made a terrific picture in the paper the next day and was probably responsible for the other cards and flowers and fruitbaskets and huge plates of homemade brownies I received after I got home.

  There was some adjustment. The walks were difficult after the first two hundred yards. So I adjusted and gave up the walking in about a couple of weeks.

  There were psychological leftovers. I didn’t feel the immediate relief that I thought I would feel once the operation was over and I was home again. There is all the anxiety that builds up before the surgery, but there is no recollection of the actual operation, whatsoever. For weeks afterwards, I would awaken mornings and not be certain whether or not the surgery had taken place. Eventually, I would get around to checking out my hairless chest with the purple scar down the middle to settle any doubt.

  There was some itching as my hair grew back. The scar puffed. It was weeks before I would turn my body fully toward the shower and allow the water to pour directly onto my chest.

  It was also a while before I could pull my shoulders all the way back and walk without a stoop. Even then, there was an unsettling pulling sensation in my breastbone. I felt quite fragile for at least the first month to six weeks after the surgery. One night I dreamed a fat lady sat down on my chest. I avoided getting near any fat ladies after that.

  The ability of the body to heal itself after trauma is amazing, though. After six weeks, there was no more pain to speak of, I could get a deep breath with little reminder of the surgery, and I even went back to hitting tennis balls.

  After the third session of rallying back and forth from the base line, my tennis partner said, “You know, you’re hitting the ball now a lot like you were hitting it before your surgery.”

  I still don’t know what he meant by that.

  I was back at my typewriter writing newspaper columns eight days after my surgery. Somebody said this once about writing a daily newspaper column: It’s like being married to a nymphomaniac. The first two weeks it’s fun.

  But it’s what I do for a living. I hate it. I curse it. But without it, I’m somebody else.

  Some very nice things happened to me after I returned home. Newnan, Georgia, is the seat of the county where I grew up. Somebody put up a big board at the courthouse in Newnan and people signed it, wishing me a speedy recovery. When they brought it to my house and gave it to me, I didn’t cry. When they left, I cried.

  My mother was in the hospital herself the day of my operation. My cousin was at her bedside during the hours I was in surgery. My cousin later wrote me a long letter telling me some of the things my mother said about me that day.

  One of the things my mother said about me was that I had been a good son. I cried again when I read that letter.

  It is still less than four months since the surgery as I write this. I have been back for several checkups. All the doctors agree the operation was a complete success.

  Once, I had the pounding, pistol pulse. Now, ever after exercise, I am barely aware of my heartbeat. I am taking only one medication, Digoxin, which takes some of the work load off the heart. X-rays show my heart is already beginning to shrink back to its normal size.

  My heart continues to show evidence of a slight leakage, but that was to be expected. Replacement valves, no matter how large, still can’t do the job of a healthy original. There is also the possibility of dangerous infections in the valve. The blood that does leak back into the heart tends to eddy and is not sent through the body’s filtering process. I am to take antibiotics at the first sign of fever, or when I go to the dentist. The mouth, it seems, is very susceptible to starting infections in the blood.

  And there remains the possibility that somewhere in my later life, my new valve will deteriorate to the point I will need a second operation. But give me a good ten or fifteen years with the valve I have and who knows how far this incredible art of heart surgery may have progressed?

  It is still too early to tell what profound effects this experience will have on me. I think I am better for it, obviously physically and probably otherwise, but I would not recommend it as a way of making improvements on one’s self until all other avenues, such as seeing a chiropractor or joining a couple of religious movements, have been exhausted.

  I do sense a few minor changes, however. I’m not nearly as afraid of flying and snakes as I was before. After heart surgery, flying and snakes become small concerns. And I’m getting around to noticing blue skies and children’s laughter a little more often, and I don’t get nearly as angry as I once did when I am standing in a check-out line at a grocery store and a woman in front of me waits until they give her a total to go digging through her pocketbook for her money, which can take forever because women carry everything in those pocketbooks, even spare parts for their station wagons. I’m just happy to be in the line at all.

  The most interesting thing I learned about myself during all this was that during the weeks and days and hours before the surgery, when perhaps I stood closer to death at any other time in my life, I felt no remorse about the fact I might die and miss doing something I hadn’t done before. What struck me as most regrettable as I considered dying was the fact I might not get to go back and repeat some earlier experiences I had accepted as commonplace.

  There were some ladies and girls I wanted to kiss on the mouth again. I wanted to watch Herschel Walker run with a football again. I wanted to see the sun come up in Venice and go down behind a cluster of tall pine trees in Georgia again. I wanted to h
ear Willie Nelson sing “Precious Memories” and watch a dog run toward me with his ears flapping behind him in the breeze and I wanted to take a fat bream off a hook and hit an overhead for a winner and squeeze the hand of a friend long lost and read the Sunday Times over Sunday morning coffee and take a first pull from a longneck bottle of beer and put on clean underwear after a shower and see my mama smile. Again.

  And now, thanks to so many good and talented and caring people, and barring any other unforeseen catastrophes that might befall me, I will.

  There is just this one other thing. There is the matter of what to do about the current condition of my second heart. We all have two. One to lub-dub and carry on the actual function of life. Another, to skip and flutter and occasionally break with the bitter and sweet that living life inevitably brings.

  They don’t write songs about the first heart, the one that can be repaired by surgical brilliance. “I Love You Sorta, Way Down in My Aorta.” That would never fly. They write songs about the second heart, the one that fills up and runs over when you hug her close and kiss her and she hugs you and kisses you back and the seat covers nearly catch on fire. The one she stomps flat and empty when she runs off six months later with somebody named Junior Ledbetter.

  There are a lot of songs that have been written about situations like that. If somebody hasn’t written one called, “If My Heart Was a Pick-Up Truck, It Would Be a Quart Low,” then they should.

  I lost my first love. I lost my second. I’ve hurt for my mama. I’ve missed my daddy, and I’ll even admit to crying over a good dog long gone to dog heaven where they never run out of raw wienies and the creeks are always cool.

  And a couple of months after my surgery, my third attempt at being married fell hard and quick, for reasons I’ll probably be years trying to figure out. The only thing I’m absolutely certain about is nobody named Junior Ledbetter was involved.

  “How’s your heart?” they ask me now.

  Too few probably ever understand my answer.

  “One’s better than ever,” I reply, “but danged if that other sucker still doesn’t have a ways to go.”

  About the Author

  Lewis Grizzard, Jr., was an American writer and humorist known for his commentary on the American South. Although he spent his early career as a newspaper sportswriter and editor, becoming the sports editor of the Atlanta Journal at age twenty-three, he was much better known for his humorous newspaper columns in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a popular stand-up comedian and lecturer.

  To learn more about Lewis Grizzard and They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/theytore.