You can't always protect the vulnerable

You Can’t Always Protect the Vulnerable

We spend our lives trying to protect what’s vulnerable.
In my case, it was always my heart.

And after thirty years of what was probably a fairly average share of heartbreak, I finally learned something profound about it.

I woke up one morning on the floor.
My living room floor.
No blanket, no explanation — just a pounding head and the vague thought that maybe I’d decided to nap by the thermostat.

It didn’t make sense.
The last thing I remembered was reaching to adjust the heat.

A few days later, I went to the doctor for a headache that refused to quit.
Had I fallen recently? she asked.

Well, there was that morning on the floor...

A CT scan revealed a concussion. I must have fallen hard.
A “routine” cardiac test uncovered something else: a complete AV block.
My heart had been stopping — completely — twenty-five or thirty times a day.

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I thought back to being ten, and twenty, and thirty — all those dizzy spells, all those doctors who said it was nothing.
It wasn’t nothing.
But this time, someone was curious enough to keep asking questions.

Because I happened to live in relatively privileged Connecticut, just next door to Yale, I only had to wait three days for a brand-new pacemaker — a small piece of metal and miracle that would keep my heart in rhythm.

A week later, I was back at work.
My colleagues joked about finding the remote control to turn down my new energy.
Who knew I’d been running on half power all my life?

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Technology, medicine, and one very good doctor gave me a second chance.
But what I really learned is this:
You can’t always protect the vulnerable.
Sometimes you just have to keep it beating — however imperfectly — and trust that someone, somewhere, will help you restart it when it stops.