August Column Winner

The heart keeps us alive, gives us life

By Jeff Mullin, Enid News & Eagle

The heart, a muscular organ roughly the size of two closed fists, is tasked with pumping blood throughout the body.

The average adult heart weighs about 10 ounces and beats some 60 to 100 times per minute, roughly 100,000 times a day and three billion times over the course of a lifetime.

The heart, in automotive terms, is the body’s fuel pump.

Thus the heart is rather simple to explain.

Ah, if only it were so.

Over time the heart has come to symbolize so much more.

The literal heart is a marvelous bit of biological machinery, but the figurative heart is far more many-layered.

I lost my heart many years ago, at a party, when the dark-haired, hazel-eyed beauty I had just introduced myself to flashed her smile. In an instant, my heart was gone, or if not gone, at least no longer mine.

We wed less than a year later and have been hand-in-hand on life’s journey together ever since.

Love is the function of the figurative heart that doesn’t keep us alive, but gives us life. Her heart is the big-gest, warmest and most loving I have ever known.

My heart’s a mess, with AFib requiring me to take a handful of pills every day to keep it in proper rhythm, rather than going off on some wild, improvised heavy metal drum solo. The heart has been the downfall of many men in my family, and it likely will someday be mine. My father, my uncle, my grandfather, all were felled by heart attacks.

But hers has been faithfully thump-thumping along for as long as she has walked the earth. Until, that is, she was diagnosed with something called aortic stenosis.

What that means is that her aortic valve was slowly and inexorably hardening, thus hindering its ability to do its primary job, which is to regulate the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the aorta and then to the rest of the body.

Hers was hardening to the point it was barely opening. Thus it needed to be replaced.

Mercifully a new technique called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, has come along in recent years. This technique enables surgeons to make two incisions, one in each groin area, and replace the valve using a pair of catheters threaded up to the heart. The old method involved open heart surgery, rib-cracking and such.

TAVR is much less invasive, and thus much less risky, than traditional open heart valve replacement. But it is still heart surgery, on that heart I have loved for nearly a half-century, so in the days and weeks leading up to the procedure I was a wreck.

The day of the surgery one of our nephews and two of our dear friends sat with me in the hospital waiting room. They kept me from climbing the walls and/or eating everything out of every snack machine in the place. They were angels.

When it was over and the surgical team said she had come through just fine it was all I could do to keep from planting a big wet kiss on both doctors. But those guys probably wouldn’t have cared for that, so I refrained.

After a seeming eternity I was told I could see her. She was groggy, she was in pain, she was as close to out of sorts as she ever gets. But that beautiful heart was still beating strong.

There were hiccups, to be sure. At about 2 the next morning my fitful sleep on a makeshift bed in her room was interrupted by the words “Honey, I have chest pains and my blood pressure’s dropping.” In that instant I got a brief glimpse of hell.

But moments later the night nurse reassured us that everything was fine, to go back to sleep. Yeah, right.

We’re home now. She’s doing well. I don’t want her to lift a finger and she gripes at me about “hovering,” but we’re OK.

Her heart’s fine. Mine’s a mess, but it’s no longer mine, so it doesn’t matter. And she is smiling again, once again lighting and warming my world.

Take anything you want for granted, power, air-conditioning, your job, your snug home, your car, but never, ever, take love for granted. The heart is the engine that drives the body. Love is the engine that drives the world.