A Match to the Heart Read online

  When the doctor on call—the only doctor in town, waddled into what they called the emergency room, my aura, he said, was yellow and gray—a soul in transition. I knew that he had gone to medical school but had never completed a residency and had been barred from ER or ICU work in the hospitals of Florida, where he had lived previously. Yet I was lucky. Florida has many lightning victims, and unlike the doctors I would see later, he at least recognized the symptoms of a lightning strike. The tally sheet read this way: I had suffered a hit by lightning which caused ventricular fibrillation—cardiac arrest—though luckily my heart started beating again. Violent contractions of muscles when one is hit often causes the body to fly through the air: I was flung far and hit hard on my left side, which may have caused my heart to start again, but along with that fortuitous side effect, I sustained a concussion, broken ribs, a possible broken jaw, and lacerations above the eye. The paralysis below my waist and up through the chest and throat—called kerauno-paralysis- is common in lightning strikes and almost always temporary, but my right arm continued to be almost useless. Fernlike burns—arborescent erythema—covered my entire body. These occur when the electrical charge follows tracings of moisture on the skin—rain or sweat—thus the spidery red lines.

  “Rapid institution of fluid and electrolyte therapy is essential with guidelines being the patient’s urine output, hematocrit, osmolality, central venous pressure, and arterial blood gases....”

  The nurses loaded me onto a gurney. As they wheeled me down the hall to my room, a front wheel fell off and I was slammed into the wall. Once I was in bed, the deep muscle aches continued, as did the chest pains. Later, friends came to visit. Neither doctor nor nurse had cleaned the cuts on my head, so Laura, who had herded sheep and cowboyed on all the ranches where I had lived and whose wounds I had cleaned when my saddle horse dragged her across a high mountain pasture, wiped blood and dirt from my face, arms, and hands with a cool towel and spooned yogurt into my mouth.

  I was the only patient in the hospital. During the night, sheet lightning inlaid the walls with cool gold. I felt like an ancient, mummified child who had been found on a rock ledge near our ranch: bound tightly, unable to move, my dead face tipped backwards toward the moon.

  In the morning, my regular doctor, Ben, called from Massachusetts, where he was vacationing, with this advice: “Get yourself out of that hospital and go somewhere else, anywhere.” I was too weak to sign myself out, but Julie, the young woman who had a summer job on our ranch, retrieved me in the afternoon. She helped me get dressed in the cutoffs and torn T-shirt I had been wearing, but there were no shoes, so, barefoot, I staggered into Ben’s office, where a physician’s assistant kindly cleansed the gashes in my head. Then I was taken home.

  Another thunderstorm slammed against the mountains as I limped up the path to the house. Sam and Yaki took one look at me and ran. These dogs lived with me, slept with me, understood every word I said, and I was too sick to find them, console them—even if they would have let me.

  The next day my husband, who had just come down from the mountains where he worked in the summer, took me to another hospital. I passed out in the admissions office, was loaded onto a gurney, and taken for a CAT scan. No one bothered to find out why I had lost consciousness. Later, in the emergency unit, the doctor argued that I might not have been struck by lightning at all, as if I had imagined the incident. “Maybe a meteor hit me,” I said, a suggestion he pondered seriously. After a blood panel and a brief neurological exam, which I failed-I couldn’t follow his finger with my eyes or walk a straight line-he promptly released me.

  “Patients should be monitored electrocardiographically for at least 24 hours for significant arrhythmias which often have delayed onset....”

  It was difficult to know what was worse: being in a hospital where nothing worked and nobody cared, or being alone on an isolated ranch hundreds of miles from decent medical care.

  In the morning I staggered into the kitchen. My husband, from whom I had been separated for three months, had left at 4:00 A.M. to buy cattle in another part of the state and would not be back for a month. Alone again, it was impossible to do much for myself. In the past I’d been bucked off, stiff and sore plenty of times but this felt different: I had no sense of equilibrium. My head hurt, every muscle in my body ached as if I had a triple dose of the flu, and my left eye was swollen shut and turning black and blue. Something moved in the middle of the kitchen floor. I was having difficulty seeing, but then I did see: a rattlesnake lay coiled in front of the stove. I reeled around and dove back into bed. Enough tests of character. I closed my eyes and half-slept. Later, when Julie came to the house, she found the snake and cut off its head with a shovel.

  My only consolation was that the dogs came back. I had chest pains and all day Sam lay with his head against my heart. I cleaned a deep cut over Yaki’s eye. It was half an inch deep but already healing. I couldn’t tell if the dogs were sick or well, I was too miserable to know anything except that Death resided in the room: not as a human figure but as a dark fog rolling in, threatening to cover me; but the dogs stayed close and while my promise to keep them safe during a thunderstorm had proven fraudulent, their promise to keep me alive held good.

  chapter 3

  Days went by. When I took a bath the stench of burned hair and skin drove the dogs out of the house. The hot place on my back still felt as if an ember had been buried under the skin but no blister appeared. I lay on a narrow daybed in the library unable to climb the stairs to the bedroom. Friends who were shooting a film in Montana thought it unwise for me to be alone and sent rescuers: Theresa, Carol, and Marsha came to the ranch, packed my things, and drove me to Livingston, Montana, where I would be near a hospital and could be watched by the tnedic on location every day.

  When we drove into the motel parking lot I experienced a blank: I could not figure out where I was or why. There was no memory of the transaction or logic that had brought me to that place and I wanted only to go to bed. From the car I rose stiffly, my ability to move only slightly better than my ability to comprehend. Inside my room there were flowers and a note of condolence and congratulations on being alive. I was reminded that I had been nearly dead.

  The setting was idyllic. The best fishing guides in Montana were on hand to teach the actors the art and “religious act” of landing a dry fly on moving water. The director, sleek and handsome in his wetsuit, was directing from midstream; French chefs served up glamorous meals to the crew; but I was having chest pains and difficulty staying conscious. While talking to friends I dropped to the ground. When I opened my eyes Robert Redford was riding a handsome black horse toward me, waving, smiling, and asking if I wanted to go for a ride. Is this what it’s like being dead?

  In the emergency room at the hospital in Bozeman, nothing conclusive about my problems was found. After a few hours I was released. As I was walking out the door the ER nurse asked why I was shuffling and when I shrugged, she went back to reading her magazine.

  During the week my headaches worsened but the neurologist in Billings wouldn’t see me. Finally I insisted, but he declined to give me an EEG, saying they were “awfully expensive and I seemed fine.” I met up with a rancher who had been hit by lightning years before. He said only, “You feel like hell for about three weeks, then you’re okay again.” So I carried on, expecting to feel better soon.

  One afternoon a violent thunderstorm erupted over the film crew. We were standing by the Gallatin River under a tall stand of pines—the worst possible place to be because lightning was striking close. I still had gashes in my head, a black eye, cuts and bruises. There was no place to go to get out of danger. I tried to laugh at this sudden predicament but noticed no one was standing by me. They were all afraid that lightning would seek me out again. Finally Redford ran over, grabbed my hand, and pulled me up a steep hill into a stranger’s house, where we were kindly given refuge.

  I decided to return to the ranch. Once there I realized that my co
ndition -whatever it was—had worsened. It was almost impossible for me to stay conscious. As I lay on my back with my feet up, the world grew black and a deadly lethargy filled me so that I could not move or talk. Chest pains, both sharp and piercing as well as deep and aching, with the classic heart attack symptoms—clamminess, shortness of breath, pains down the left arm—kept me awake all night.

  In the morning I called my parents in California. A feeling had come over me that something was terribly wrong and I began to think I might not survive another day. The presence of death in the room was vivid. In mid-sentence I passed out and when I came to they were still on the phone. My father patiently asked if I thought I could get on a commercial flight and when I said no, I didn’t think I could, he paused, then said, “I’ll be there in four hours.”

  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. I
n 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.