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| Copyright Jill Johnson |
I was twenty-eight years old the day a stranger
saved my life.
It sounds dramatic, but to me, a novelist, it is
only in the retelling.
I was born with an electrically nutty heart that
goes back in our family to the Civil War. My great-grandmother was told she
would die at a very young age (and lived until she was 70). Without pacemakers,
our hearts are slow, sometimes beating in the 20s at night. They carry the risk of going into atrial
fibrillation. Sometimes when my heart “flips
out,” it is clocked at 180 beats a minute. It’s like a popcorn popper in my
chest. Because there are only a few families in the world with the same
congenital condition, we are a bit of a curiosity. My grandfather and
great-uncle were studied at Duke and are diagrammed in a medical journal.
A guy named Igor (really) at Harvard once asked my
extended family to give blood samples to try to isolate the gene.
For a long time, I was always the youngest person
in the cardiology waiting room. So people have always wanted to know “what it’s like” when they learn I have a
heart condition. They look concerned.
“Ask my
husband,” I sometimes say. While we were dating, he’s the one who led me
out of a church service after I turned to him in the pew, about to faint, and
said, “I can’t see. Everything’s gone
black.” He’s the one who still married me anyway and then didn’t complain
when I went into atrial fibrillation on our wedding day, messing up our
honeymoon. He’s the one who stood by at a restaurant in Detroit two years later,
while a nurse who happened to be at the next table pumped on my chest.
My eyes were open. He didn’t tell me that until
years later.
I was flat on the floor of the restaurant when I started
breathing again. There were no bright lights. No otherworldly experiences. I
was there, and then I wasn’t. When I came to, it felt like a truck was sitting
on my chest. I learned later that wasn’t because of my heart. It was because of
the pressure necessary for effective CPR.
I don’t remember the face of the woman who breathed
into me. My husband, a journalist, has said the best reporting he ever did was
getting her name and address that night while waiting for the ambulance. She
lives in northern Michigan. She was an out-of-towner, a neo-natal nurse, in
Detroit for the theater that night. I was supposed to be in a car with my
husband on a ride to appreciate the turning of the autumn leaves. We changed our minds.
Her name is Nan. Every Thanksgiving for more than
twenty years, I have sent her a card. My son, born four years later, exists
because of her.
Like most people with chronic conditions, I don’t talk
about it much. There are little things, of course. I don’t like watching when a
show like Grey’s Anatomy has its
defibrillator paddles in overdrive. I have to turn my face away or change the
channel. I’ve been shocked out of atrial fibrillation more than twenty times, maybe
thirty. My husband once told me, while I was in a high-pressure journalism job,
that I couldn’t treat the ER like a drive-through McDonald’s.
I don’t talk about my heart much because I know how
lucky I am. That night, I rode in an ambulance to one of Detroit’s biggest
hospitals, nicknamed the “Knife and Gun Club.” I was rolled next to a man
handcuffed to a gurney. Later I was moved near a young boy who was having a
convulsion while his parents stood there in panic. I saw a child, bald, with
cancer. Or maybe that was another time.
Too many times.
Things have settled down now. At the hospital in Detroit, I was treated by a
good Jewish doctor named Michael Lehmann. I don’t care if that’s a stereotype.
He was kind and brilliant and stuck a pacemaker in me. He knew how scared I
was. I had passed out, not because of my heart condition, but because another
doctor with a fancy French name and a lot of credentials had overdosed me on a
drug. Dr. Lehmann is the one who later saw me through my pregnancy. He told me,
“I’m here to help you live the life you
want.”
Don’t get me wrong. I complain about a lot of things. About the frenetic world
of publishing, about the pickup truck that cut me off, about how they are
putting fewer chips in potato chip bags.
But my heart?
My heart has made me better. Maybe that is why I gave Tessa, the heroine
in
Black Eyed Susans, the same crazy heart.
It was like giving her a part of me. It was assuring her she could survive.
The only difference is that she can really, really
run. Fast.
black eyed susans by Julia Heaberlin is out on 13th
August 2015 (£12.99, Michael Joseph)
Black Eyed Susans
17-year-old
Tessa, dubbed a 'Black-Eyed Susan' by the media, became famous for being the
only victim to survive the vicious attack of a serial killer... Her testimony helped to put a dangerous
criminal behind bars - or so she thought. Now, decades later the black-eyed
susans (yellow flowers on the cover) planted outside Tessa’s bedroom window
seem to be a message from a killer who should be safely in prison. Haunted by
fragmented memories of the night she was attacked and terrified for her own
teenage daughter’s safety, can Tessa uncover the truth about the killer before
it’s too late?
You can find more information about Julia Heaberlin
and her books on her website. You can also find her on Facebook
and follow her on Twitter @Juliathrillers
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