Ross I understand that you are feeling very frightened. After all this incredible event occurred and you haven't a clue as to why. Nor do you know what you should do to prevent another heart attack. You must feel that you haven't any control regarding your destiny. Well I think if truth be told I really don't think any of us have control and we just fool ourselves into thinking we do. Just look at what happened to uncle Henry. He did all the right things and than he got hit by a truck!
Well I hope you succeed in uncovering some information that will provide you with some peace. But I also hope that you can balance your quest for information with some pleasurable activities that provides you with some relief from your fears. I realize that your definition of your self has changed. Before your heart attack you were a man who was pursuing a healthier lifestyle through exercise and diet. Now I guess you see yourself as a post cardiac patient. Well both things are true and over time I hope you will be able to balance out both identities.
Love,, mom
As for Frightened... I don't use that word...
When I turned 40... or around that time... I had two goals that I kept pretty much in perspective... One was to be showing my paintings by the time I turned 50... Now, I've basically lost the reasoning behind that endeavor with my passion towards understanding the human body and finally truly conquering my health issues during the past 1.5 years.
The second goal was to become a middle-aged man in perfect health. My mental model was Uncle Henry... And I had my goal set for the age of 50. Truthfully, I saw that age as being magical for me and not connected with the question of being "over the hill." Before the heart attack, I saw myself way ahead of schedule... while not yet there 4.5 years before reaching 50, much less than 4.5 years from achieving that goal... So, with the heart attack, it's not a question of becoming that "super man" I strived towards, although within reason, but a question of understanding truly what is going on... It's a shock. An incredible disappointment... although in this life I've learned repeatedly that when I expect something... as if I see it as being "in the bag", the game suddenly becomes greatly changed... I should be very weary of what I expect, since, at that moment is when things are about to change greatly. This is the theme of my life from the age of 4... Think about it: what toddler in a stable household expects to suddenly lose one of their parents... that stable household being thrown into an unimaginable dystopia, chaos? I've gotta be very careful about what I expect from Margarita, since we've had a very increasingly healthy and productive, constructive relationship for 12 years now... but, for the moment, maybe it is enough that I'm the heavy variable or probability of change in this situation... That, although our relationship continous very strong and healthy, our future has been thrown "up in the air."
But back to my relationship with my heart attack:
Following the "doctor's orders" for preventing another cardiac "event" and not considering any other form of responding to the situation is overly passive, and makes me think of a premature elderly man or a hospital patient struggling down the hall with a hospital gown and a rolling I.V. poll he's pushing alongside himself... One second running 4-7 miles per day, the next second... But, the problem is that there is something wrong with the equation... and it seems that I'm the only one actually interested in understanding the discrepancy... and no, this isn't prime-time television or Hollywood... Truthfully, no one really gives a damn if there is something "tragically" interesting here... or "unjustly" amiss. I have those words in parenthesis because I don't actually believe that there is anything tragic or unjust here... But that most typical Americans would consider this tragic or unjust. Regardless of this argument, the issue is with how I respond to the situation... Part of the situation are your comments or the comments of others or the lack of response by the cardiologist or the nutritionist... not that they haven't responded to my emails. But, they don't assist in the questions regarding the bio-chemical/physiological issue/concern at hand, my theories or the information I've come across, the new factors within the equation as shown by the blood tests. So, generally, I feel that I'm just talking to myself about what I've come upon or I'm the only one giving myself a pat on the back for having come across a possibly important piece of the puzzle... I see my history as a very interesting and very complex case study. But, I'm the only sociologist or social worker actually interested in the history... And in the end, my story won't help anyone but myself... to understand. But, truthfully, has anyone ever truly adequately answered the question, "for what are we here on this planet, in this life? What are we here for to do?" And, no, I don't believe it is to pro-create/reproduce the human species... since we work equally hard at destroying ourselves and our human community... But, equally, as you know, I've never bought into your perspective that "we only live one life." Yes, we don't have concrete proof of past lives or future lives or afterlives... But something has very strongly hinted to me that we are so much more than this current life... As if there was something we are here to do... with other people... and the loss of people and how we lost them or how they shaped us when we were together is very important towards understanding... especially if you see the connection between them and you and your offspring or how your presenting them to others influenced the "others'" lives... especially if those people influenced were not blood relatives, like my father's relationship with Uncle Henry...
Truthfully, how important was Uncle Henry as a person... as a doctor? I would imagine we could say that he greatly influenced many people. But, if we weigh his accomplishments against that of my father's, we could naively believe that my father accomplished nothing more than make you a young widow and make 3 young children "orphans"... giving two of them his illness and making the three of them live miserably for long periods of time or for many intervals over a long period of time...
And, yes, that would be a belief based upon ignorance and naivity. But it wouldn't be the ignorant naive person's fault if they didn't hear Uncle Henry explain how it was my father who inspired him to become a doctor, study sciences and go to medical school one day... What my father did for your impressionable little brother (ten years his junior) was give him an incredibly important role model, a hero, which turns out to be such a modern-day miracle... Both men were "tragically" cut down. But, not before both had shared their powers with an other or others...
Bad knews about your theory about Uncle Henry... based upon what I read over a month ago on "ghost bikes" or "transportation alternatives"... He wasn't wearing a helmut, which would have saved his life... But, for some reason or another, he had to leave the story.
And, some how, some where, this is where I pick up the story, because it was exactly 6 months after Uncle Henry's death that I started looking at my health and my illnesses alternatively, when I decided to take a proactive interest in my health and started researching alternatives and learning about nutrition and the importance of fruits, vegetables, cow's liver, herbs, seeds, spices, nuts, legumes etc for health and healing... but, at first, mainly for nutrition and for creating a certain internal balance...
I know it leans towards wishful thinking, but I can't help thinking that Uncle Henry and my father are spiritually connected with me in my pursuit of true health or some basic truths about the human body... that we may have become out of touch with due to modern consumerism that includes how we shop, eat, and confront ailments and illnesses...
It's easier to buy an energy drink or take some prescription medicine than it is to understand why we lack energy (beyond what we consider normal) or why we have become ill... Life has become a convenience store, a take-out restaurant, a microwave dinner, a disposable cup (you don't have to spend/waste 30 seconds washing it)... We believe we have no time.. and then, suddenly we see that we've run out of time... and that, maybe we didn't spend the time for possibly creating more time... we didn't invest quality energy for creating quality time.. and now we suddenly realize that we are the disposable person...
And that's how I see the doctors' relationship with our ailments... and, moreso, the pharmaceutical companies' disregard towards how their drugs truly affect our health and our future, since what they are regarding much more than health concerns is the stock report's bottom line... and how they fair against the competitor and if the public still believes in them or their product... Instead of being a patient with a problem that the doctor must solve which translates in the concept of "cure", we are just statistics without organic individuality, meaning that our illnesses or ailments may have a different cause and a different remedy than the others...
Did you notice last year that Noah Gordons Epic book "the Doctor" of the Doctor Cole trilogy became a movie? The story is about a suddenly orphaned English boy is taken under a "Barber's" custody and is shown how to sell elixers and entertain people in fairs 1,000 years ago... However, the boy was born with a gift of sensing the health of the patient brought to the Barber (Barbers were actually healers--barbaric healers--and doctors were actually blood letters back then... "the dark ages" controlled by the Church, that intentionally ignored the science of the Greeks and the Arabs. In mid-evil Europe, it was more likely that you would be killed by the more prestigous Doctor than by a barber. But, the barber wasn't practicing medicine either...) when he grabbed their hand... Actually, he was sent a jolt of what was about to happen to the person if they were about to die of some sort of illness... During the barbers rounds around the British Isles, he was presented to a Jewish doctor, much different from the Christian doctors, who had lots of medical transcripts and a basic understanding of curing certain popular ailments. The boy asked the Jewish doctor how he came across the transcripts and how he learned to cure, since the boy needed to work with his "gift" that scared the hell out of him... And the Jewish doctor explained that he would have to travel to Isfahan (the former Persian capital of present time Iran) and study under the great Persian Doctor/Professor Ibn Sina, otherwise known in world scientific and medical history as Avicena... but that it would be impossible for him, since the great medical schools of the middle east only accepted Muslims and Jews... In the end, the boy turned young man disguises himself as a Jew and makes the 3 year journey from England to Persia; in the end studying under Ibn Sina (Avicena). Aside from this being an incredible story and a look into modern plagues and how doctors (and governments) of the middle ages responded to plagues... and how appendicitis was possibly the most prevalent killer of non-plague time, mainly because the church prohibited exploratory surgeries (you could amputate, but you couldn't open the person's body to heal or understand them, although you can mutilate hundreds of thousands of people in constant religious or political wars or in your prisons or Cathedral basements) and prohibited autopsies/dissection of human cadavers...; at the time, common belief was that the internal human body was the same as that of a pig's. So, to understand human appendicitis, human disease, the doctors dissected pigs... which was a fruitless endeavor for curing people.
The greatest lesson Ibn Sina (Avicena) taught the young man was, "in order to cure a person, you must first learn to truly listen to them with all of your senses..."
I am certain that is what Uncle Henry believed.
So, if the doctors don't want to truly listen to me... then I've gotta pay a lot of attention to myself... while I still have the senses to do so... And if all of this is just talking to myself... well.. at the very least, I've become a very good listener and I've learned over the years to highly respect myself. You have no idea...
Think about it... The winter that Anya was in Kiev, Ukraine, I was placed on anti-depresants again... and again, I had a "psychotic episode" where I tried killing myself... I downed a ton of the anti-depresants with a lot of Rum and I didn't awaken for about 2 days... This was living in my last apartment on Ocean Avenue between Kings Highway and Avenue O... A wonderful apartment or lair... I claimed that it was an existential game I was playing with God... "Truthfully, if you created me to die 'before my time', then let's play a bit of Russian Roulette... and see truly what are the stakes..." But, call it what I did... as the "intellectual" I was, there was only one bottom line: I was tired of being left, every since dad died... you emotionally left... But, there may have been a problem with never breast feeding..., which also is an icy and immediate intentional distancing of the mother towards the baby... But, not only could I not handle being left, although I also did the periodically leaving... (Leaving for Mexico was my grand achievement towards the illusion of leveling the playing field... There's a point in the toddler's life when they try "punishing" the parent [or the sibling or the cat or the dog] in a way they feel they were "punished".. and they start repeating the same responses to their parent [or the others] in very seemingly "adult" ways... You would call it "role playing"... But, I believe that it is a way of trying to seize control of their emotional world... If they could be like their parent, they could stop feeling so needy or helpless... Often you can see how a husband treats the wife by how the toddler talks to his mother... at least here in Mexico... I am certain that he learned that way of relating to her by his father! Where else would he have learned that inconsiderate, hurtful or disrespectful adult behavior?)... there was another bottom line: I hadn't yet developed a stable self-image of myself that would continuously place me in positions of vulnerability... But, the development of that stable self-image truly must be formed in a healthy and stable home/school/neighborhood environment during the person's formative years of childhood and adolescence... Not to have begun the developmental process in College and later on... especially not in New York City... But, as you always said, "City kids are SO MUCH more sophistocated than suburban kids..." So, I imagine I had much more to learn in NYC than I would have learned in suburbia... It was either "make it or break it..." And I left for Mexico...
And I truly learned who I am and learned to greatly appreciate and respect myself... I overcame so many obstacles you can't imagine. And I developed a true and healthy identity and helped develop the identities of others here... Maybe I won't "give Margarita a house..." But, I truly believe that I gave her an incredible experience and a wonderful oportunity. The problem is that I think a premature ending to my life would cause a horrible and incredibly heavy sadness in hers... Believe it or not, I believe that there is an injustice of sharing so much with her or introducing her to what no one else would have introduced her to... If I exit prematurely. And that is the great emptiness I would leave her...
And that's a problem for me.
You don't believe me... Or you believe I'm exaggerating... Or you think this is very egoistic... or that I'm full of myself. However, let me tell you about egoism:
The most wonderful part of my life with Margarita was when I stopped painting and could dedicate much more time and energy to her needs and our relationship, when we could truly apreciate the "fruits of our labor", for what we truly had struggled so many hours for so many years... When I stopped thinking about the time I needed for finishing a painting or, upon returning from the fairs, when would I start painting again... Or if she wanted to do something with me (like physically bonding at night when I was painting until possibly wee hours of the morning) or taking a walk or going to the movies or any form of truly quality time together... I found myself battling between her needs and my needs, "weighing the consequences"... And then the wonderful experience of being able to plan a vacation she wanted in December and visiting Enrique and Ivette in Mexico City and visiting Tepotzlan, Morelos with them (Do you see Margarita's wonderful happiness to the left way above Tepotzlan?) and then visiting her parents in Veracruz and then travelling with her to Tabasco and visiting Villahermosa (and its parks and museums; that I NEVER wanted to do in Xalapa) and the cacao plantations and then returning to her parents' ranch for New Years... and not once having anything I could imagine better to do... and truly enjoying time with her... And that was my life with Margarita the year before my heart attack, losing weight and truly spending quality time together... that made my painting so obsolete...
Yes, I know what a "premature" death would do to Margarita... Because I've always known just how important our relationship was for us... and what inspired me the day I met her in Las Cañadas and why I strove those first 5 months to prove to her why we must make a life together... I lost connection with that during the incredibly stress and difficulties of my life in Mexico between 2003 and 2010... A lot of resentment built up... But, we learned to overcome that. Margarita's birthday week in Sayulita was "the icing on the cake" of our relationship... at least for me.... which is what makes the heart attack "12" hours after returning from the coast that much more frustrating...
Would you believe that I believe her experience with me in the hospital (her first true "hospital experience") was very important/meaningful for her and the both of us... She had heard so much of our family's hospital experiences and my hospital experiences. But, she had never truly been there... had your experience or that of Tracy or Esta or... I know it sounds a bit "morbid" or twisted. But, we can both say that she was by my side while I was "on the table" and the whole night long... and was as strong and "level headed" as can be hoped for... and adapted very well alongside the nurses...
So now we have that under our belt...
what next?
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