Man's Chest Holds Ticking Time Bomb
Washington--The heart is a time-bomb. You carry it around in your chest. On still nights, in the dark, you can hear it ticking away. Then one day--if you're one of about 30 per cent of the people-| it seems to explode. Maybe there's only a dull pain, or maybe it's a blinding pain, and then death, or long months of lying quietly in bed.
Recently the public health service said heart disease is still the No. 1 killer, that 460,000 people died of it last year. For years, as people have grown older, they've wondered how a man feels who's had a heart attack and recovered. They've wondered what it did to him and to his thinking about himself. A man who had such an attack, a man of 44 who had been extremely active physically, was asked these questions.
He told how it had been for a couple of nights before: There was a terrible feeling, like indigestion, not a sharp pain, just that dull feeling that sent him to the doctor. The doctor took a cardiogram, a check on the heart. The man asked him, dead-pan, when it was over: "Well, what's the score?" "It's a heart attack," the doctor said. "How much time do I have?" he asked him. "I don't know," the doctor said.
"You may live 10 years, maybe 20, maybe till 65. I can't tell how your arteries are." It was a terrible shock. The man had thought his arteries would be all right till he was 100. Anyone feels that way. The man's attack was mild.
He could sit up in a chair most of the time and read. He told everyone: "I looked out the window, day after day, and my whole life went before me. I thought: suppose I die today or tomorrow. What difference does it make? "I can't see where it makes much difference, except to my family. It wouldn't make much difference to me.
I've lived my life. I know what being alive in the world is. "I've tried to live it without hate or prejudice for any other human being. People to me have always been people. I've had no illusions about them.
Some have been horrible. Some have been wonderful. "I know that if enough of us act decently with all other human beings we may work out a civilized society. I think we can do that. I'm not sure we can.
"I've been married. I know what it means to subordinate some of your own ideas to someone else's so there can be peace withir. a home, at least. "I've had children. I hope I've done a good job with them.
I'll never know for sure, because they will live longer than I. "I can't solve anything myself. All: I can do is contribute to the things I believe in. If I die tomorrow, or 30 years from now, that's all I can do. "I know if I die today, I leave a job unfinished.
I hand it to my children, just as my parents and grandparents handed it on to my me. I think it will be like that for a long time."
