It was December 1979, I was 20 years old and a junior in College. I had driven down to Southern California to stay with my father for the Christmas Holiday. Mostly I went back to visit old friends from elementary and high school who hadn't moved away and old teachers. Yes I was just that nerdy enough to still visit past teachers. My teachers were my surrogate parents and so I often times would visit them either during their school day, or in some cases at their homes.
My father never really knew what to talk with me about. He would ask a few stock questions..."How is your car" (A guy question, I know), "How often do you get your haircut" (I have no idea why he wanted to know this), "Are you dating anyone (fodder for another blog), and "How is your heart these days". Up until then I had been able to get away with the following answers..."Runs great", "Whenever I have enough money", "I'm too busy studying" and "No problems". After that, he ran out of questions, and I ran out the door to visit friends.
That year however, he had more questions. "How long has it been since you've seen Dr. Johnson?" he asked. Well, truth be told, I couldn't remember the last time I saw my pediatric cardiologist. As I thought about it I realized that one of the last times had been back when I was about 11 years old. That experience was just traumatic enough to stick in my memory.
At each doctor's visit throughout my childhood, I would lie on the exam table in just my underwear and Dr. Johnson would listen to my heart as he rolled me all over into different positions. Then he would stand me up and have me jump up and down for what seemed like an hour (but I'm sure was only about 3-5 minutes) and listen again. After all that he would do an EKG, send me out to the waiting room to read the latest issue of Highlights magazine, while he talked to my mother and Nana; Nana almost always came with us, until I was 8 years old and she moved down to Oceanside. After that it was just my mother who took me. But no one ever talked to me.
At this particular visit, I was lying on the exam table after I had done the Mexican jumping bean imitation, getting ready to have the EKG, when Dr. Johnson's nurse Alberta (who had known me since birth) suddenly blurted out, "Well look, she's started her period!" at which point Alberta and my mother spent the next few minutes discussing my "womanhood", leaving me to wallow in my own complete and utter humiliation.
Shortly after that visit, my mother ran away and spent the next few years in and out of mental hospitals. My heart was farther down on the lists of family crises, so no one paid as much attention. I went a few times after that, but stopped going entirely sometime in high school. So by the time I was a junior in college, it had been at least 4 or more years since I'd seen a cardiologist. That Christmas in 1979, my father pushed it and asked, as a favor to him, if I would go see Dr. Johnson while I was in town. I agreed, mostly so we could stop talking about it.
On this visit however, as soon as he listened to me the first time, he sent me next door to get an echocardiogram, a new test I'd never had before. After that test, he scheduled me for an immediate cardiac catheterization. The last cardiac cath was done when I was about 8 years old. So I was pretty sure of what to expect. When they wheeled me into the surgery suite however, I had two big surprises in store for me...when you are an adult, they don't put you to sleep, and they go in through your groin, not your arm (which I didn't figure out until some woman came at me when a razor and a big bottle of betadine).
Looking back, it was a good thing that I was awake through the entire procedure. I might have otherwise made very different decisions about my future. The pressure gradient between my left ventricle (the chamber that pumps blood out to the rest of your body) and the aorta (the artery that carries blood out to the rest of your body) was 120 millimeters of mercury, when it should have been zero. And the opening between the two was about 90% blocked.
As soon as the cath was over, Dr. Johnson leaned over and said "Well, at least now we know what to do; we just have to find out how soon we can get you into surgery".
I was stunned. "What do you mean surgery? I'm not feeling bad! I backpack, I climb mountains, I don't need surgery!" My words were a bit pressured, even for me.
Dr. Johnson looked at me patiently with his eyes raised slightly, as if talking to someone who wasn't maybe the brightest crayon in the box. "If you don't have surgery NOW, you won't be able to backpack or climb mountains. You'll be dead in a year or so."
And so I did what any normal, highly intelligent, over-achieving, never say die college student would do. I told him and my father that I didn't have time for surgery, that maybe we could wait until sometime in summer, and promptly drove myself back up to San Francisco to spend the rest of my Christmas break with my on again/off again lover, Polly, and her family. A few days after Christmas, Polly, her mother and I were sitting around the kitchen table as I told them the story. Jeri's mother couldn't fathom why didn't I want to have surgery as soon as possible.
"In a few weeks I'll turn 21! I only get to turn 21 once in my whole life and I don't want to miss the opportunity to celebrate that!". As I said it, it sounded a little weak even to me.
Anyone who knows me at all, knows that if nothing else, I'm logical. With her eyebrows raised in that same expression my cardiologist used a few days before, Polly's mother said "Well dear, you'll still be 21 after the surgery. And don't you think you will have a much better time celebrating knowing that you'll someday turn 22?". Well she had me there.
Never one to procrastinate once I had made up my mind, the next day I called and scheduled the surgery for the first day they had open: January 10, 1980. Three days before my 21st birthday.
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