(Dobbs) It Has Happened In My Life 2,608,538,400 Times (more or less)
Life is fragile, life is durable.
I don’t know if you’d call this an “epiphany,” but it might be as close as I’ve ever come. It was a few weeks ago, when in the flash of a moment’s time I thought about the almost incalculable number of times my heart has beaten in my 76+ years on this earth. It this was an epiphany, it was about both the durability, and the fragility, of life.
To explain what happened if not why, I have to go back to the beginning. Not the beginning of those 76+ years— who can remember?!— just the beginning of my years as a heart patient.
Back in the year 2001, I had a small series of heart attacks. Not because my diet was full of fat and crammed with cholesterol, which it wasn’t, and not because I wasn’t fit— the most intense attack came while I was pedaling up a Colorado hill on a hundred-mile fundraising bike ride, which we call a “century.” The cause was heredity. Or as I’ve always described it to others, I chose the wrong father and grandfather.
So I had surgery, and ended up first with stents— that surgery is called an angioplasty— and when that didn’t seem to do the trick, I had open-heart surgery, also known as a bypass. Ever since then, I get annual diagnostic tests with the doctor I met when I got to the ER after that ill-fated bike ride: my cardiologist.
The most recent was a few weeks ago. It’s called an echocardiogram. Simply put (as if it’s even correct to call it simple, which it’s not), this is a high-tech procedure where a technician rubs an instrument back and forth across your chest and your abdomen. It converts the high-frequency sounds of your blood flow— they call those the “echoes”— into images of the structure of the heart itself. It’s looking for abnormalities in the organ’s chambers and valves, calculating the velocity and volume of blood passing through with every beat. Some medical practitioners call it an ultrasound of the heart.
I guess I’ve had the test more than twenty times, and each time, when the technician turns up the sounds of the blood pumping through my body, I get to hear them myself. But they’re kind of hard to describe. It’s not a “tick-tick-tick” kind of noise, nor smooth waves of sound. Although I’ve worked with words for a living, the best I could come up with when I started thinking about it was the reverberations of a plunger in a plugged-up toilet. But that really doesn’t describe it either. Thankfully, I asked the technician if he had any thoughts about how to describe it and he saved the day. He likened it to the sound of a washing machine when the cylinder is rotating back and forth: “Swoosh… swoosh… swoosh.”
And that’s what got me to wondering, how many swooshes have there been? So I did the math. A warning: do not try this at home, because you’ll probably find what I found, that your computer’s calculator can’t produce enough zeroes and you’ll have to do it all by hand.
But I was on a mission. So I began with a baseline of 65 beats per minute. Sometimes it’s even slower, and sometimes— particularly when I’m biking or skiing or maybe just nervous enough to elevate my heart rate— it’s faster. But we’ll go with 65 beats per minute.
What that means is, 3,900 beats per hour, 93,600 in a day. And now we get to the big numbers: in a year, my heart beats 34,164,000 times, and that doesn’t count leap years. Now, to jump from millions to billions, we have to multiply 34,164,000 by 76, for the years I’ve been alive, and between my most recent birthday and today, add 110 more days (that’s another 10,296,000 heartbeats) and add those nineteen February 29th’s I’ve been around (yet another 1,778,400 beats) to come up with a lifetime total of 2,608,538,400. And again, that doesn’t even count days when my activities have elevated my pulse for hours on end. Nor, by the way, my years as a child when the heart beats faster than an adult’s.
Of course you could subtract a few heartbeats from that ten-digit total to account for those heart attacks back in the year 2001, the reason I got into this in the first place.
But hey, who’s counting?!
And now back to what might be the epiphany. Not everyone gets to 2,608,538,400. Many don’t get anywhere close. Life is fragile. Hearing those swooshes during the electrocardiogram sent me a sign that my heart will give out some day. Everyone’s does. If a tumor, a stroke, or a bus doesn’t get us first.
Or in other parts of the world, a war, a famine, a preventable disease, an inexplicable act of terrorism.
I’ll never forget sitting in the ancient Grand Bazaar in Tehran one day many years ago sipping coffee with my camera crew when a man shuffled slowly past us, bent over at a 90-degree angle, bearing a heavy crate on the horizontal plane of his hunched back. Just beyond our table was a flat platform where he turned around and slowly let the crate slide to its surface. Then he turned again and shuffled out, free of the crate but still bent at 90-degrees. For him, after so many years hauling heavy loads, that was the permanent profile of his back. For him, life’s fragility was defined by the ability of his body to endure.
Yet for us, the most physically pampered generations in history, life is also durable. True, whether it’s the heart or the back or the hips or the knees, some of us punish our bodies in the pursuit of our health (and isn’t that ironic!).
Some day, and it might be some day soon, other generations will look back on our era and think our medical miracles were primitive, but for most of us now, conditions that not long ago would cripple or kill us can be fixed and we can get back on our feet. If that weren’t true, I’d never have gotten anywhere close to 2,608,538,400 heartbeats. But I did, and the heart’s still ticking.
So I still ski in the winter and cycle in the summer. More than ever before, harder than ever before. Every day is a blessing if we’re lucky, and if we live long enough.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
So happy for you, Greg - a great reminder to all of us to appreciate a healthy heart! J & R
Greg, thank you for this beautiful piece. I had forgotten your heart attacks but am very glad, 22 years past, that you are well and writing about your experience.