"As I walked away with my refreshments, I felt something peculiar.
It was so strange it stopped me mid-step. I was forty-five years
old, and I had felt many things, but never before this particular
feeling: I felt a click deep inside. The image the sensation
produced in my mind was of a BB, a small round piece of
copper-colored lead, falling into a socket. It was a very clear
image. A BB is tiny, but the one I imagined felt infinitesimal,
microscopic. Yet I felt it, a click, metal on metal-like an
expensive, microscopic gear had slipped, some exquisite piece of
machinery falling out of alignment. Some medieval example of
craftsmanship, a gyroscope, something intricate, needing fine
balance. The feeling, the event, was located in my chest, below my
left breast. It was thoroughly interior, as if a signal had been
sent and registered, what those giant satellite dishes are poised
waiting for, a transmission from deep space." -from Chapter 1 That
was October 26, 1991, in what became a singularly awful day in the
life of William O'Rourke. Minutes later, at the beginning of a
Notre Dame football game, he began to suffer his heart attack.
O'Rourke's account of that day, and everything that followed, is
personal, informative, humorous, and highly literate. With its
extended description of what an MI feels like and how people around
the patient react, his memoir provides a bedside view of his
experience and all of the emotions-both extraordinary and
quotidian-that accompanied it. What is startling is how that
momentous event, the heart attack, divides life irretrievably into
a "before" and "after." Gone are the assumptions of what is safe
and healthy; replacing them is a newly-forged relation of mind and
body, a treacherous one which breeds a physical paranoia that only
lessens after months. O'Rourke vividly describes the extreme pain
of the attack, the forced inactivity of recuperation, and the
melancholy of embracing life anew while accepting a heightened
awareness of mortality. He knows his luck in having supportive
family and friends, and uses his time away from normal routine to
examine his family history for likely genetic proclivities for
heart disease. Through his description of his experience-from MI,
to angioplasty, to cardiac catheterization to, fourteen years
later, a quintuple bypass and a second round of
cardio-rehabilitation-he asks us to change behaviors we can affect
and pay attention to our health. It does, after all, come down to
this: "Here's to life." Enriched with a medical glossary and
selected bibliography, this is a helpful compendium for other
recuperating patients and their families, or anyone concerned about
heart disease, or interested in memoir.
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