A Match to the Heart (3 page)

Lying on the floor of the ranch house, I felt the life in my body trying to ebb away. At times I couldn't even stand and, reaching up from the floor, pulled clothes off hangers and stuffed them into a duffel bag. At the time I had no idea I would never spend another night at the ranch.

A Beechcraft King Air dove down out of Wyoming's blue sky and landed at the Greybull airport. Somehow I had driven myself to the local landing strip. Nor was I so sick that I couldn't recognize a sexy plane. We boarded quickly, turned the plane around and headed for California. The pilot had brought sandwiches and sodas. With my feet propped up, I watched the Rocky Mountain cordillera give way to fins of red rock and the sacred mountains of the Navajo. High desert changed to Sonoran desert. The southern tip of the Sierras dwindled and melted into ground that stolen water had converted into cotton and alfalfa fields.

Half dead, I was being taken back to my childhood home. The desert behind us, I could now see the coastal range: ridges and ridges of blue, then brown grassland cut off abruptly by a green and turquoise sea. Floating above the edge of the continent, I felt I had been resurrected. Below, the Santa Ynez Mountains rose to Tranquillion Peak, then dwindled into a gently sloping hill that plunged into the blustery Pacific at Point Conception. This is the place the dead go, the local Chumash Indians say, as if the slope were a staircase of the dead. This is their gateway to the afterworld.

An automated lighthouse turned its head like an owl and winked its penetrating light into the plane. After death, according to Chumash legend, the soul first goes to Point Conception, which was a wild and stormy place called Humqaq. There, below a cliff that can only be reached by rope, is a pool of water into which water continually drips. In that stone basin can be seen the footprints of the dead. They bathe themselves there, then, seeing a light to the west, go toward it through the air, and reach the land of the dead, called Similaqsa.

I had risen from the dead, and to return home I had to pass over this desolate point, this charnel ground. The Chumash legend said that in the evening the people at a nearby village would see a soul passing on its way to Humqaq. They motioned with their hands at the soul and told it to return, and they clapped their hands. Sometimes the soul would respond and turn back, but other times it would simply swerve a little from its course and continue on to Similaqsa. Then it shone like a light and left a blue trail. Sometimes there was a fiery ball at its side, and as the soul passed by, there was a report like a distant cannon—or thunder—and the sound of a gate closing.

The plane turned south as the land here does, facing into the sun. Under us the jigsaw coast smoothed out and the sea churned, its white lights going on and off as if signaling us to land: HERE, HERE.

chapter 4

My mother had made an appointment with a prominent cardiologist kind enough to take me on an emergency basis. On the way to his office I began sinking into unconsciousness. By the time my mother pulled up in front of his building, I was gone.

Nurses and a doctor came out to the car. Semiconscious, I was wheeled into an examining room. But the darkness kept descending. Though unable to move, talk, or see, I could hear every utterance clearly. One of the doctors said, “I can't find a pulse.”

Shirt off, EKG leads glued to my chest, I felt my mother stroke my hand. Then a doctor's rich-toned voice—that of Blaine Braniff, the cardiologist who would care for me—whispered, “I can't believe she's still alive.”

Blood pressure and heart rate are supposed to compensate for each other: if the pressure goes down, the heart speeds up to pump more blood. But mine did the opposite: not only was a pulse difficult to find, but my heart was slowing down. I could hear the nurse reading the heart monitor: 50 ... 40 ... 30.... Is this how you die? I wondered. But every word being said rang in my ears with absolute clarity.

An IV with atropine was started, and very slowly, like a fly on a cold day, I began to come around. Once again, my two dogs—Sam and Yaki—seemed to be with me, pulling me out of that bleak state, sledding me up shafts of light to consciousness and safety. When I looked up, my doctor was standing over me. He had unarmored eyes I could look into, and before I was able to speak, he made me smile.

Long ago, when my friend David was dying of liver cancer, I dreamed he was trapped inside an opaque cocoon that kept rolling down a muddy hill. I could only see a faint outline of his emaciated body but could hear his keen voice: “I'm not dead yet,” he said. Seventeen years later my own cocoon was black, a monk's cowl dropped over my brain, a diver's lead weight pulling me down into a gray sea, and no one could hear me.

 
 
Dark again, not black but gray, the vagueness I hated. But it felt good to lie still for as long as I wanted and rest. More dreams from David's death-days rang through me: David alive, but a skeleton, sitting in a wicker chair made of bones, beckoning me to come closer, laughing at the joke of existence which is the reality of death. Or lying on top of his coffin, one of many lined up around a circular driveway—not a skeleton this time but fully clothed, and, like the lighthouse at Point Conception, winking at me.

 
 
 
Dr. Braniff touched my forehead and hand. My father had arrived and was standing with my mother. I struggled to move and talk and sound normal, to reassure them—always the urge to appear better than one really feels. Is this training useful or not? I wondered. The nurses pulled the leads off my chest. “Okay, let's go,” the doctor said, then drove me the single block to the hospital in his own car and, half-carrying me, passed through the emergency room straight up to the cardiac care unit.

I was hooked up and wired so that heart rate and blood pressure could be monitored. Blood-pressure cuffs were put on each arm, IV catheters inserted into my veins in case they were needed for atropine. In an acute care unit, male and female nurses work twelve-hour shifts and have only two or three patients apiece. They were attentive, kind, and curious, and the fishbowl effect of the rooms, with glass walls on three sides, increased the intimacy. Unlike the brutalizing effect of such close quarters in a jail, this elbow-rubbing was just what I needed. Death visited but was no longer ravenous, only a small figure stuck in the far corner of the room. I kept my eye on him. All around me were very sick people, some just back from open heart surgery, others with worn out hearts who were on ventilators and life-support machines. Yet no place could have seemed as welcoming to me. For the first time in three weeks I could relax.

The tests they gave me were the ones routinely given in the first hours after a lightning injury: another CAT scan to check for cerebral bleeding, X-rays for broken bones, blood panels to monitor kidney function and cardiac enzymes, EKGs for the late onset of arrhythmias and changes that might indicate tissue damage in the heart or lungs, and an overdue EEG to make sure my blackouts weren't epileptic seizures. Lying on a small bed with wires attached to my skull, I watched white printouts of brain waves stack up on a table beside me and wished the motions of mind, the hieroglyphics of imagination, were as accessible to me, that they were the pages of a novel coming into being.

 
 
While he read my books I studied the literature of lightning injury. My vision was blurred from the medication I was taking (Norpace), which made my heart beat regularly whether it wanted to or not. In a 1990
Medical Journal of Australia
I read this: “Lightning as a cause of death and injury is a highly significant natural phenomenon with potentially devastating effects. Almost every organ system can be impaired when lightning, an electric current, passes through the human body taking the shortest path between the contact points. The overall mortality rate following lightning injury is 30% and in survivors the morbidity rate is 70%. In the United States there are several thousand lightning-related injuries reported every year with almost 600 deaths, a figure which makes lightning responsible for more deaths in the US than any other natural phenomenon.” Wyoming, I learned, has the highest death rate per capita from lightning, but that's probably because any kind of medical care—good or bad—is hard to get to in such an underpopulated state.

During frequent visits to the cardiac care unit, Blaine demystified the medical jargon. Direct hits by lightning can cause unconsciousness and coma, cardiopulmonary arrest, or ventricular fibrillation, which is cardiac arrest, and autonomic, nervous system damage. As millions of volts of electricity pass through the body, brain cells are burned, “insulted,” or bruised, which can re-suit in cerebral edema, hemorrhage, and epileptic seizures. Passing down through the body, electricity hits the soft tissue organs—heart, lungs, and kidneys-causing contusions, infarctions, coagulations, or cellular damage that can lead to death. Tympanic membranes in the ear sometimes burst from the explosion of thunder, and cataracts develop if the flash has been intensely bright. Cases of leukemia have been recorded, and when pregnant women are hit, either spontaneous abortion occurs, or else they carry the baby to full term but after delivery the infant dies. “It's no wonder you feel like hell for a while,” I told him.

Later I read this: “Death from Lightning—the Possibility of Living Again” one case history announced. This is the seeming miracle for which lightning injury is famous. In
₁₉
6
₁
a ten-year-old boy was struck while riding a bicycle. Slumped unconscious against a tree, the boy was given back-press, arm-lift artificial respiration, though on arrival at a hospital, twenty-two minutes later, he was apparently dead. For seven minutes no artificial respiration had been given. On admission his pupils were dilated, he was pulseless, and he was not breathing. Mouth-to-airway respiration was instituted immediately. When the chest was opened it did not bleed; the heart was motionless. Cardiac massage was given and epinephrine was injected into the left ventricle. Five minutes later heart action started and he was placed on a respirator. Twenty-nine days later he was discharged from the hospital, almost fully recovered. When he returned to school a month later, his IQ measured slightly higher than it did before the accident.

It is now thought that such miracles can happen because metabolic rates seem to come to a standstill after the body is hit by lightning—a hot-flash hibernation reaction, like the one induced by cold. Burns are the cause of another controversy. Why are some people burned and others not? When friends saw me after my accident they seemed disappointed. “I thought you'd have a black imprint of lightning across your face and down your shoulder and a streak of white hair, or else you'd be bald,” one acquaintance told me.

Besides “Lichtenberg's flowers”—the transient, feathery pattern due to imprints from electron showers through the skin, not true burns at all-I had the one spot on my back that felt as if it were burning, though it left no mark. Whether someone is burned or not depends on the duration of the lightning stroke. “Cold lightning” is the first stroke, which carries much less heat and spends less time in the body than the “return stroke” from the ground back up to the cloud. Those hit by the return stroke are burned; those hit by the initial charge are not, and apparently I was one of those lucky ones.

 
 
A slow death, a stupid dwindling, or a fatal arrhythmia-that's what might have happened if I had stayed in Wyoming. My concussion and head wounds had healed, my balance was better, strength was returning to my limbs, my memory was good (though 1 didn't feel very fast or sharp), and the terrible aches and pains were subsiding. But what deeper injury was causing the problems that persisted, what kind of chemical and electrical chaos had been generated in my body when all those volts of electricity passed through?

The lower my blood pressure fell, the slower my heart beat. Insufficient cardiac output eventually results in death. My body was not getting enough oxygen or nutrients and nothing was telling my heart to get up and go. Blaine listed my problems: anginal-like chest pain, orthostatic hypotension (abnormally low blood pressure), and bradycardia (a slow heart rate). But the root causes were still unclear.

How odd that we walk around with these bodies, live in them, die in them, make love with them, yet know almost nothing of their intimate workings, the judicious balancing act of homeostasis, the delicate architecture of their organs and systems, or the varying weathers of their private, internal environments. Up to this point my living and breathing had been an act of faith. I existed but I didn't know how. I was a stranger to the body whose consciousness said, “I know myself,” which meant only that I had decoded the brain's electrochemical message that told me to think such a thought.

I lifted the bedsheet. All I saw as I looked down was a pale container, skin whose bruises and cuts were only ornament, ruby and onyx jewels. How could I have been so uncurious? If I held a match to my heart, would I be able to see its workings, would I know my body the way I know a city, with its internal civilization of chemical messengers, electrical storms, cellular cities in which past, present, and future are contained, would I walk the thousand miles of arterial roadways, branching paths of communication, and coiled tubing for waste and nutrients, would I know where the passion to live and love comes from? It is no wonder we neglect the natural world outside ourselves when we do not have the interest to know the one within.

chapter 5

“Fire is not following you, you are following fire,” Takashi Masaki, a Japanese farmer-monk admonished me. Was this ocean into which I had fallen a blue flame? For six months actual fires had been breaking out all around me. A plane caught on fire on the runway in Denver and when we leapt to the ground from the stairs and began running—as per instructions—upwind from the plane, the fire engines almost ran over us. A month later the Dallas hotel I was forced to stay in because of another delayed plane burst into flames as I entered the lobby. In June several IRA bomb scares in the London tube sent me dashing up steep stairs to the street. And in July the spruce forest that flanked the runway at Fairbanks erupted as my plane landed and for two weeks the skies of interior Alaska were smoke-gray.