It’s been a wet winter, and trees and plants and shrubs and weeds have been engaged in a kind of reproductive bacchanalia that brings on my allergies. Very occasionally, they’re so bad that I battle allergy-onset asthma.

After four weeks of coughing, I made the prompt decision to visit my doctor. It didn’t take her long to reach a diagnosis. She looked at my ankles, which resemble Popeye’s forearms. She noted my weight: I’d gained 17 pounds in two weeks and had been forced to make a WalMart run for fat jeans.

So it wasn’t allergies and it wasn’t asthma. It is, instead, congestive heart failure.

Here’s the definition I openly plagiarized:
Congestive heart failure: Inability of the heart to keep up with the demands on it, with failure of the heart to pump blood with normal efficiency. When this occurs, the heart is unable to provide adequate blood flow to other organs, such as the brain, liver, and kidneys. Abbreviated CHF. CHF may be due to failure of the right or left ventricle, or both. The symptoms can include shortness of breath (dyspnea), asthma due to the heart (cardiac asthma), pooling of blood (stasis) in the general body (systemic) circulation or in the liver’s (portal) circulation, swelling (edema), blueness or duskiness (cyanosis), and enlargement (hypertrophy) of the heart. The many causes of CHF include coronary artery disease leading to heart attacks and heart muscle (myocardium) weakness; primary heart muscle weakness from viral infections or toxins, such as prolonged alcohol exposure; heart valve disease causing heart muscle weakness due to too much leaking of blood or causing heart muscle stiffness from a blocked valve; hyperthyroidism; and high blood pressure.

I have most, if not all, of those symptoms. Of course, “prolonged alcohol exposure” is probably the most likely among a network of causes.

 

After the doctor visit, I do what I always do in situations like this: I Googled. Half of the hits came up and confidently predicted that I have about five years to live. Tops.

Elizabeth did some more detailed research and found those to be a worst-case scenarios. With proper diet and medication and exercise–which, right now, I am just too tired for, but I’m going to give it shot tomorrow–I could live so long and become so obnoxious that people will actually want to take a contract out on me. They might even Crowdfund to get the job done.

I have two excellent doctors and even better, the Fisers. Randy has been my friend since high school and my fellow teacher, and his heart problems, with the help of his self-discipline and his incredible wife, have been largely neutralized. He is as vigorous now as he was in high school, when he played football and swam. So they’re going to educate us.

Hearing the diagnosis was a tough call. I was so proud of myself for beginning again with sobriety and was fighting the physical and emotional pain of withdrawal, and I was winning. It’s just that I couldn’t stop coughing, which was my body’s attempt at self-preservation, at expelling the fluids that were filling me up like a water balloon.

 

 

It’s a tough call, too, to be so open about this. I’ve already told my family, of course, and about twenty friends, most of them AGHS colleagues or local historians. But to put this out into the open is not intended either to frighten people or to solicit pity for me. I don’t want to do either of those. And I remain, thank you very much, forcefully and stubbornly alive.

Good things have come of this. I went to church–to my cradle church, St. Barnabas–Easter Sunday and almost started crying over the words of the liturgy I’d grown up with. Also, I sat next to retired teacher Shirley Houlgate, one of the AVID pioneers and one of the loveliest persons I’ve ever met. Dan Krieger  has asked me to contribute some columns for Times Past, and despite the possibility that the copy editors were downing Margaritas and messed part of the piece up, I got in a column about my Dad. The theme, as it turned out, was about reconciliation and that’s a good one for Easter Sunday. I’ll probably contribute three or four more in the coming weeks.

What worries me is having the energy to start new stuff. My kind of writing requires interviewing, traveling, hours and hours at the computer and even more hours and hours taking notes in museums and libraries. The amount of work that goes into even a little 35,000 word book is staggering.

This also meant that I’m going to have to cancel the Adult Ed class I’d planned to teach in the fall, and that was, for me, like canceling Christmas.

For now, getting healthy again involves a lot of inactivity, something I hate. I’m happiest when I’m busy and am most myself (other than when I’m in the classroom, when what you see and hear is the most authentic Jim Gregory there is) when I am utterly and completely lost in research, like tracking down the serial number of a B-17 shot down in October 1944.

 

 

So I am completely unsure about what the future holds. I am sure, increasingly, of how much I love my family and of how beautiful our dogs are (my standard greeting to Wilson: “Hello, Handsome.”) I think it’s time, too, for me to get outside more and be much less the literary hermit I’ve been the last four years. I think that was me compensating for missing my teenagers.

Most of all, I want to live a long time for them, for those teenagers who are no longer teenagers. My last bunch, from the Class of 2015, is graduating from college and going on to grad school or law school or med school or careers. Some of them have fallen in love and are going to be posting baby pictures in the next few years.

Other kids from my past, no longer kids but admirable young adults, are fighting health problems as serious or even more serious than mine, and they are doing so with such honesty and  openness that they humble me in the oddest way: I’m finding out that it’s possible to be humbled and immensely proud at the same time.

That’s not a bad way to live out my life no matter how long it may last. For now, that’s a good long time.