Life is Good

This is a true story by Stephen Hunter, a cancer survivor. He is is a Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic for The Post. He had a heart attack in 2004 and survived. I hope you enjoy this story.

 

I GUESS I'm the bad boy of heart attack survivors. Mine played like low comedy from the start. It felt not like shearing pain; I had no revelations of mortality and sense of end times and lost opportunities. Actually, it seemed Bill Clinton was sitting on my chest playing the saxophone. 

My initial diagnosis was hunger, so I left my apartment, bought a hamburger and returned to see the end of the game. When the game was over and the burger gone, Bill hadn't left, so I drove to a famous hospital's emergency room and promptly got into a fight with a line-butter who said he had asthma.  

I thought a heart attack trumped that, but there was no order, no authority in that place. Just pure Hobbesian angst. Not for me, thank you very much. 

So I drove across town to a smaller hospital, where I was well treated from the start and even – I love this part! – recognised. (The head of medicine was a fan of my books.) I got my stent in 45 minutes, which I remember mostly for the one-liners, the best of which belonged to the young doctor who put the thing in. She said, "If you write about this, make me taller and cuter." 

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