My Remarkable Journey (18 page)

Later, people told me that my face had a gray pallor—one of the warning signs of an oncoming heart attack. But I didn’t feel
anything out of the ordinary… until about an hour later.

At about four in the morning, I got this ache in my right shoulder that began moving down my right arm. I got off at five
and drove home. The pain wouldn’t go away, and it wouldn’t let me sleep. So I called my doctor, woke him up.

Right-shoulder pain is an odd symptom for a heart attack. There was no chest pain. My doctor thought the problem might be
my gallbladder, because the gallbladder can give off refractory pain.

“Wait an hour,” he said. “If the pain is still there, come to the hospital and I’ll see you as I make my rounds.”

An hour passed and the pain didn’t go away. Chaia was sleeping. I didn’t wake her—which to this day angers her. But I had
no idea how serious the situation was. I didn’t want to upset her. So I called up my CNN producer, Tammy Haddad, and she drove
over and took me to George Washington Hospital at about 7:30 a.m. I smoked on the way.

We pulled up in front of the emergency room. People now call it the Ronald Reagan Emergency Room because it’s where the president
was taken after the assassination attempt. As I got out of the car, I noticed that the pain had disappeared. Doesn’t this
always happen? For some reason, the pain goes away as soon as you pull up to the hospital.

“Tammy,” I said, as I got out of the car, “wait here for me. The pain has gone. It feels like I’m OK.”

I stepped through the doors into the crowded ER. It looked like it would be hours before somebody would see me. So I turned
to leave. What could they examine anyway? There was no longer any pain. I walked back toward the car, but there was no car.
Security had made Tammy move.

This was years before everyone had cell phones. I couldn’t call and tell her to come back and pick me up. So I went back inside.
There was a guy there with a clipboard—a spotter. I didn’t know there was such a thing. But there are spotters in many large
emergency rooms.

What they’re trained to do is pick out people in need of immediate care. It makes sense—what if a guy comes in with a heart
attack and he’s fifth in line behind four people with broken pinkies? In a case like that, this person is supposed to spot
him.

Out of nowhere, this big guy comes straight over to me and says, “You a heart patient?”

“No.”

“Come with me.”

I followed him into a cubicle, the same cubicle Reagan was taken into. An emergency room doctor came in. I described how the
pain moved from my right shoulder down my arm. There was an EKG attached to my chest and an IV in my wrist before anyone asked
to see my Blue Cross card. Tammy came in, saw what was going on, and went home to get Chaia. My Mutual radio producer, Pat
Piper, came over to replace Tammy so that somebody would be with me.

A Dr. Warren Levy came through the door.

“It’s gone,” I said. “I’m no longer in pain.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Levy said. “If you’ll stay, I’ll stay with you. Because we want to do some tests when the pain comes
back.”

I noticed that he didn’t say
if
. He said
when
.

OK, I told him, I’ll wait. He left me sitting there dying for a cigarette. But you can’t smoke in the emergency room.

After a little while, the pain returned, and, oh, did it come back—the most terrible pain I’ve ever felt. Doctors and nurses
did their tests, hung the results on a board across the room, and gathered to look them over. I was sitting there when they
all turned and came running toward me.

Funny how humor protects you. “I don’t think this is a pulled muscle,” I said to Pat.

Dr. Levy came over, looked me in the eye, and said, “Mr. King, there’s only one way to tell you this. You’re having a heart
attack.”

“Am I gonna die?”

“Good question. That’s why they pay you the big bucks. The answer is, we don’t know. It’s too early. However, you’ve got three
tremendous advantages. You’re having your heart attack in a hospital—you’re not out on a ski slope. Two, it’s a right-side
heart attack. In right-side heart attacks, there’s a seventy-five percent recovery rate even if the patient doesn’t get treatment.”

That’s just the nature of the right-side heart attack. The artery in question affects only 17 percent of blood flow. It can
kill you, but it usually doesn’t.

The third reason was that George Washington University Hospital was one of the few hospitals that were using an experimental
drug called tPA (tissue plasminogen activator), which breaks up the clots that block blood flow in the arteries. The only
problem was that there was a 1 percent chance the drug would cause a stroke.

I didn’t care. At that point, I felt like I was dying. The moment I finished putting the
g
in my signature the nurse started the tPA. When I later looked at my signature on that page, it was unreadable. But five
minutes after the tPA went in, the pain was gone. Now this drug is in ambulances everywhere.

The cardiologist who took over, Dr. Richard Katz, told me I’d have to stay in the hospital for a week. By this time, Chaia
had arrived. She’d paged Herbie, who happened to be flying in to Washington. She’d also called Angie Dickinson.

“Angie,” Chaia said, “I have terrible news.”

“Don’t tell me,” Angie said. “Your ferret died.”

Herbie landed at the airport, heard his name paged, and immediately knew something had happened to me. To this day, he doesn’t
know how or why. He just knew. He spoke with Chaia and came straight to the hospital.

There was one problem. I’d been placed in the cardiac care unit. Only immediate family members are allowed to visit you in
the CCU. But we’re talking about Herbie. It wasn’t long before Herbie was striding down the corridor toward my room, looking
over at people who weren’t there, and speaking to these invisible men and women so that everyone down the hall could hear,
“Yes, yes, I’ll take care of it! I’ll talk to him!”

As he walked in, he saw me, and I must have looked like death warmed over. All he could think of doing was extending his arms
outward for a hug. Oh, my friend…

I extended my arms to meet his embrace and yanked out every line that was connected to a monitor.

Beep beep beep
s resounded through the corridor. The monitors at the nurse’s station must have shown that the guy in bed number 12 was dead.

Nurses and doctors came running in and threw Herbie out. They rehooked everything up. There were going to be a lot of changes
in my life. I’m sure the doctors told me not to smoke anymore. But they didn’t have to. I was so scared that nobody had to
say a word. Eating had always been an event for me ever since my mother prepared my first dinner. But I offered no resistance
when I was told, “No more fatty lamb chops.” I knew what I’d been doing wrong. I did stupid things, but I wasn’t stupid.

The rest of my life was going to be Cheerios and bananas for breakfast with skim milk. Salad for lunch. Chicken or fish for
dinner with steamed vegetables. A treat was going to be low-fat, low-sugar frozen yogurt.

A week later, I was given the OK to leave the hospital. Chaia drove me home. Along the way, I took the pack of cigarettes
out of my pocket and threw it into the Potomac River. I’ve never smoked since.

A little more than six months later, I went in for a stress test—the first stress test since the heart attack. I wasn’t on
the machine for two minutes when the doctor watching me said, “Step off.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You’re going to need heart surgery.”

“What?”

I was stunned. How could it be? I’d stopped smoking, changed my diet, started to exercise a little, and cut my all-night radio
show back an hour. I’d even bought new clothes after moving my spring outfits to the front of the closet and getting a whiff
of the cigarette odor all over them. During all the years that I smoked I could never smell the scent on my clothes. I took
all my old clothes to the cleaners to be fumigated, but they couldn’t get the odor out.

“I’m not going to let you take this test any further,” the doctor said. “You have a lot of blockage. You could die during
this test.”

“I came in for a stress test,” I told him, “but this is not the stress I was looking for. I want another opinion.”

The data was sent to Herbie’s nephew, a great cardiologist in New York. He looked over the results and called me. “Yeah,”
he said, “you need surgery. If it were me, I’d have it done by Dr. Wayne Isom. Great surgeon. Great guy.”

“OK,” I said.

But for some reason, I put it off. Not just some reason—I was scared of dying. Denial can make you think crazy things. I actually
convinced myself that the cure for my blockage would be invented any day, that I’d pick up the newspaper and see a giant headline
that read:

There is no way to describe how scared I was. If you’d told me I could avoid the surgery and live comfortably for the rest
of my life by swearing off sex, I’d be celibate to this day. But there were no such options. I was stopping to catch my breath
as I walked through airports and taking nitroglycerin tablets for the chest pain.

If I was going to die, I wanted to die in New York. Two months after the stress test, the surgery was scheduled with Dr. Isom
at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Many people who’d had the surgery called to tell me it would be a snap. But as the weekend approached, as friends offered
humor and support, the only thing I could think was that it would be the last time I’d talk to them.

On my final night on the radio before I went to New York for the surgery, the columnist Art Buchwald was the guest. He told
me that for some reason he always ended up going on shows when the host had little time left. Then he brought up his wife’s
emergency bypass surgery. “Let’s be honest,” he said, “no one cares about your surgery. Your friends will listen to you for
about three minutes. Acquaintances? Two minutes. Strangers? One… unless you have a quintuple bypass.”

The next day, a Friday, Jon Miller drove down from Baltimore, where he was announcing the Orioles, picked me up in Washington,
and drove me to New York. I don’t think I heard a word he said during the entire trip. The only thing going through my mind
was:
They’re going to open up my chest. They’re going to open up my chest.
The surgery was set for Tuesday. I had one last weekend.

I stayed with my brother and his wife, Ellen, in New York. Once, when he was a newborn, I plotted to throw Marty out of a
window because he was stealing my parents’ attention. As we grew up, our differences became more apparent. I spent money as
soon as I got it. Marty was very frugal and hid his money all over our apartment. One day, I found two quarters and took them.
When he discovered the loss, he went ballistic.

“I’ll give you quarters,” my mother told him.

“No, that’s not the point. It’s the principle. He stole the money!”

“It’s not stealing. You’re brothers!”

“It’s stealing! He should go to jail!”

We drifted apart when I moved to Miami. But there’s a closeness that comes when you look at your brother as if it’s the last
weekend you’ll have together. We became even closer six months later when Marty found out he needed the same surgery. Must
have been the genes.

I was scheduled to check in at the hospital on Sunday night. Now, with insurance companies in control, you check in on the
same day. Sunday arrived, a dark, rainy November day that looked like death.

That afternoon, Bob Woolf joined my brother, my sister-in-law, and me as we went to the hospital. Chaia and Andy were on the
way. We arrived, and there was Mario Cuomo standing with the head of the hospital. They were there to wish me well. Mario
brought a baseball bat as a gift. I still have it.

“Mr. King,” the head of the hospital said, “I want to assure you that you’ll be getting the finest of care. Everything is
set. You don’t have to bother with the paperwork. Mr. Wolf will take care of that. We’re going to show you to your room.”

We went up this elevator to the eighteenth floor—and what a room! It had a magnificent view overlooking the East River, beautiful
cabinetry, and a huge television screen. The only sign that I was in a hospital were the monitors next to the bed.

While we took in all this splendor, the head of the hospital said with a flourish, “The Shah of Iran stayed in this room.”

“As I recollect,” I said, “
he
died. How about a ward with forty-two patients? All of whom go home.”

Everybody had a laugh. Mario left. The head of the hospital left. Which left my brother and his wife, Chaia, Andy, and Bob.

Before my brother went in for his surgery, six months later, I advised him not to have the family come with him when he checked
in. It’s incredibly depressing. You look at everyone and think,
I’ll never see them again.

I don’t believe in God or heaven. I’ve always liked the joke about the guy who falls into a manhole, breaks both legs, and
says, “Thank God I didn’t die.” Why thank God? He gave you the broken legs.

But you couldn’t call me an atheist, because that’s a religion. When I told Billy Graham that I didn’t believe in God, he
said, “I hear you say that. But you’re one of the most spiritual people I know. God has a special calling for you, and I feel
that with all my being. So you can think what you want, because we’re given free will to think. But you’re in a special place.”

As the surgery approached, I can tell you that I wanted to stay in my special place. I wanted to see all the people I loved
again. But it’s a very pessimistic surgery. People tell you it’s no big deal after they’ve been through it. But I’ve never
met anyone who checked in and said, “Piece of cake…”

The surgeon arrived wearing a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots. Dr. Wayne Isom.

“Mr. King,” he said, “you’re gonna do rihhhhhght fahhhhn. Rihhhhhhhhhght fahhhhhn.”