A Few Thoughts About Oxygen and Other Heart Essentials
If you’d told me when I started my blog nearly a decade ago that, in the waning hours of the summer of 2022, I’d be penning a post accompanied by a photograph of a ResMed 11 CPAP machine and an AirFit F20 full face mask on my nightstand, I almost certainly would’ve thought you were crazy. And yet, here I am and there it is. But actually, that’s not the crazy part. What’s crazy - in the most literal sense of the word – is that it took me as long as it did to get here and, in retrospect, that I got here at all. You see, the truth is: I was first alerted to the possibility that there was a problem more than 5 years ago, when my wife mentioned that my breathing seemed to stop with some regularity while I was sleeping. I, of course, immediately dismissed the concern – a uniquely male trait – as impossible, given the arduous work schedule I was keeping, the amount of physical activity I was routinely engaging in, the mental acuity I was enjoying, and the fact that I seemed to have more than enough energy to spare at the end of the day – all of which were “contraindicative” of a person suffering from what otherwise sounded a lot like sleep apnea, at least based on the 20 minutes of research I’d allowed myself on the Mayo Clinic website! And so, rather than ask someone who actually knew what they were talking about whether there was an issue and, if so, what I could do to correct it, I decided I knew best and, in this instance, my idea of “best” was to ignore and power on.
And, power on I did. In the intervening 5 years, I would bill about 10,000 hours, walk about 3,000 miles, endure a marital separation, pack up and move to five different homes in two different states, change work locations 3 times, organize and host a weekend Summit that brought together a number of the country’s leading eating disorder experts, spearhead a year-long effort to draft and publish a first-of-its-kind, consensus-based report and recommendation inspired by that gathering, experience a 2-year global pandemic, present (albeit virtually) at an international eating disorder conference and two legal conferences, write several feature articles in various legal publications and several dozen blog posts, co-present on a number of webinars, attend my daughter’s wedding – and, perhaps not surprisingly, spend a helluva lot of time in therapy along the way! But, here’s the kicker: I finally broke down and decided to undergo a sleep test – mostly to prove I’d been right all along and, in the process, silence those who claimed to know better once and for all. The thing is: I hadn’t been right. In fact, the two day test revealed that I’d been very “wrong” (which, in this case, meant I’d stopped breathing) an average of 57 times an hour! That means that, assuming I slept an average of 8 hours a night during that same 5 year period, I had stopped breathing a mind-numbing 166,440 times! Thanks to modern technology, it’s now under control. But, even today, as I type that number, I shudder to think what could’ve happened - and likely did happen - as a result of my insistence on doing things “my way” and, in the process, deprive my heart the full complement of the oxygen it needed to not only survive, but thrive.
My recklessness made me pause and wonder what other essential nutrients I may unwittingly have been depriving my heart of all these years. Months later, I got the answer in the most unlikely of ways, when, quite unexpectedly, a remarkable young woman, in a very dark season of her life, found her way to my doorstep. To the outside world – both personal and professional – my friend is a poster child for the Seemingly-Has-It-All-Together brand – a brand with which I am intimately familiar. She is hard-working, diligent, thorough, punctual, unflappable, even-tempered, eager to please, and would never compromise work responsibilities for personal needs - to name just a few of her many admirable-in-the-eyes-of-the-world attributes. But, the tears that suddenly – and, at least from her perspective, embarrassingly – flowed freely as we started to talk told a very different story. “I’m sorry,” she said, apparently sensing a need to apologize for feeling. “I’ve always managed to power through times like these by doing, by distracting, by compartmentalizing, and, when all else fails, by numbing. But, this time, it’s just not working and I’m afraid.” We sat for a few minutes in silence, now both in tears, each reflecting on their place of origin, and then, as if speaking into a mirror, I offered this, borne, in part, of my recent bout with heart deprivation and the better part of a lifetime spent living in her skin: “It - the denial, the stuffing down, the diverting our eyes, etc. - works until it doesn’t,” I began. “And the little girl inside you, the one trying to bear the weight of a lifetime of hurt, the one gasping for air in the mountain of stuffing, is telling you, 'it’s not gonna work anymore,' that her heart – your heart - needs healing, that she (and it) need the freedom to feel.”
About an hour, half a box of tissues, and enough knowing smiles to convince both of us a seedling of hope had been planted later, my friend got up to leave. As she did, I had the “craziest” thought: “If I managed to deny my heart the oxygen it needed to breathe at least 166,440 times in just 5 years, how many more times had I, like my friend, just as recklessly denied it the freedom it needed, longed for, and deserved to experience and express its feelings – all of them – in the course a lifetime?” More than enough I decided.
