My Aneurysm Made Me Do It
When I got the news about the aneurysm, I was in a little examination room in a Stockholm hospital. The doctor who walked in and delivered it to me had one of those stern faces, the kind that looks like it rarely laughs on account of the etched in frown lines.
In his slightly accented English, he said, “We found something not normal.”
“Not normal?” I thought. I always knew I was more or less abnormal in a number of ways, but this made me feel one of those lumps in my throat that tends to precede the receipt of bad news.
“Not normal,” he repeated.
Thinking back on it, I wonder how much he’d practiced his bedside manner, if he’d put in morning reps in front of a mirror and said to himself, “This’ll freak them out and keep them guessing.”
My guess is probably not. His delivery seemed more like improv. He was the kind of doctor who looks at you the way a butcher looks at a cut of sub-par meat behind the counter.
“You have a dilated aorta,” he told me.
My impulse to shrink into a sea of self-pity, to curl into a ball and hide and wish I’d never heard him say those words, was strong. Who the fuck was he to tell me I wasn’t the picture of health? I’d been working out two to three hours a day, trying to get in decent shape for my pilot medical exam, and now Doctor Grumpers had to drop this steaming turd on my dreams.
If you think two to three hours a day of exercise is excessive, I’ll agree. I don’t come close to that now, but I do enjoy the solitude of being outside, breathing fresh air while moving my body, looking at the trees, passing by humping squirrels, that sort of thing.
For those who don’t know, the aorta is the big artery that carries oxygenated blood out of the heart. And mine happened to be shaped like a balloon right after it came out of my heart.
I asked him what I could do.
He told me, “There’s no treatment. We just watch it for now.”
Just watch? I thought. Unacceptable.
The idea of sitting around with an artery ballooning in my chest and doing nothing felt like sitting on the deck of the Titanic and sipping a margarita while the other passengers were getting into lifeboats.
I didn’t want to do nothing. But I also didn’t want to volunteer for surgery.
Here’s why.
The surgery for fixing it involves splitting the breastbone in two (which makes me think of eating chicken and breaking the wishbone), and also stopping the heart so they can wrap the diseased aorta in the surgical equivalent of a bullet proof vest.
Lacking better options, I decided to experiment on myself. Not with drugs or procedures, but with food. Maybe there was a way to slow things down, or even reverse the disease. I know I might sound crazy saying that, but it felt like a back against the wall kind of situation.
That’s why, for a while, I ate a vegan diet. I ate bitter kale and lentils that made me fart every 49 seconds. I even spoke on the phone with Doctor Esselstyn, the cardiologist from the Cleveland Clinic who reversed heart disease in almost 200 patients by putting them on a low fat vegan diet.
But then after a few months of eating vegan, my meat and fat cravings got too strong. I felt my resolve weaken, and then one night I caved when I was out to dinner and ordered the meat and potatoes.
I could never stay away from meat for more than a few months at a time. Sometimes, I even convinced myself that moderation was the way to go. My mother thought that was a good idea, and who can blame her?
But nothing about having an aneurysm was moderate.
When it came to my diet, I did a lot of reading online. And, to no one’s surprise, there were about a thousand different diets for dealing with “inflammation,” “gut issues,” and more. Me being me, I’d look at the extremes of the spectrum and start there.
On more than one occasion, I went more than thirty days eating only meat and animal products, because I saw tan and fit doctors on Youtube saying it was the way. That’s the frame of mind I was in.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “All those diets can’t be healthy,” you’re probably right.
I don’t know why I do that, bouncing between extremes. I think it comes from fear and desire, from wanting to find the magic bullet hidden in some obscure medical journal, and from also not wanting to miss out on something that might help shrink the bulging sewer pipe in my chest.
As I write this, I’m on day seven of a water fast.
I’m fasting because it’s supposed to trigger a deep cellular cleanup and repair process called autophagy. And from what I’ve read, people with my condition often have dysfunctional cells in their aortas, smooth muscle cells to be more exact. So why not clean those up and tell the body to make them faster, stronger, and better looking? It just seems like a common sense thing to try. And after the fast, I’m going to eat a low fat vegan diet without any salt, sugar, or oil, because that’s supposed to be kind to the lining of my blood vessels, called the endothelium.
Another thing I’ve learned through this experience is that, when you’re trying to reverse a medical condition for which your doctors say you can’t do anything, it can bring out a certain level of nerdiness.
Seven days is by far the longest I’ve ever gone without food. The first five days of this fast were a miserable blur of headaches, then dizziness and hunger that kept me on my back; I made semi-permanent ass prints in the mattress on my side of the bed.
The hunger made me crave everything; when I went to the mall to run an errand with Annelie, my fiancé, we walked past the greasy Asian fast food place on the way out, and in that moment I felt my stomach punching me from the inside, demanding some nourishment. I won that round, but barely.
Annelie has been sweet and supportive during my fast, even though I have strong keto breath from living off my own body fat for the past week. I’m careful not to put my face too close to hers too quickly, lest she get a strong wiff of it when she isn’t ready. I’m told my breath isn’t as bad as a wet gym towel forgotten in the bottom of a duffel bag, but not exactly roses, either. So I’m slow to go in for a kiss.
Surprisingly, I still fart, even after 7 days without food. This amuses me. Some of them are even genuine rips. Annelie says it’s because I’m drinking sparkling water and the bubbles have to go somewhere.
She says, “You’re basically drinking farts.”
I consider myself duly enlightened.
Nearly every day, I’ve been taking my blood pressure with one of those home monitors, and the numbers have been mostly falling. That should make my next visit to the aviation doctor a more pleasant experience.
The other benefit is that I feel like I’m undoing years of self-inflicted dietary abuse. Just to show my masochistic streak, I’m imagining all the food I loved to eat, the food that I packed into my almost 45 year-old spare tire with stealthy ease: the hot dogs and sausages cooked over camp fires; the fresh sourdough baguettes and melting butter; bacon, which, as Jim Gaffigan has said, “even sounds like applause when it’s cooking;” the cheese my mom makes in her own creamery in Maine, especially her Truman Day Tomme; the steaks and sauces and oven fried potatoes; and, to top it off, all of it surrounded by enough black coffee to fill a medium-sized above-ground pool. Yes, those things were a dear part of my life.
As this fat melts off my body, I feel like I’m saying goodbye to those indulgences. Maybe even for a long time. Because I’m still on a mission to deflate a balloon, slowly but surely, until it looks more like a normal aorta.
Of course, there’s a lot of faith at play here. I don’t actually know if there’s damage being undone during this fast, or if I’m doing too little, too late. But in between the (now less intense) hunger pangs, I feel a certain softness edging into my demeanor. I guess I just feel like there’s less pressure trapped inside me. It’s like someone is deflating another balloon, one filled with the pressure of struggling to make ends meet, of trying to be a good dad, of trying not to end up useless and washed up under a blanket.
Wouldn’t it be funny if our diseases really were reflections of our emotions? I know, if you take that too far, you get into blaming patients for their ailments. And it also sounds like something Gwenyth Paltrow might say. But something about it also rings true for me. I’ve heard Gabor Maté speak of the power of the mind-body connection, and I think I’m far more full of shit than he is.
So yes, I’m writing this with more softness than I’m used to feeling, and I think I’ve only pooped three times in the past 7 days, with the last one resembling a vile little acorn.
I know this because I examined it while still on the throne. And while that may be TMI, I know I’m not the only person to do so.
I’m going to keep going with this water fast thing. My plan is for one more week. Maybe I’ll have an enlightenment along the way. Or maybe I’ll look at people and see their heads turn into bacon.
If I’m honest, I’m hoping like hell that the aneurysm responds to this water fast and starts the healing process. But right now, I can’t know. All I can do is have a little faith that things are going to work out.
Because I’ll take a little less “not normal” any day.
