The Beat Doesn’t Always Go On

For a long time, the phrase “like Sherman marching through Georgia” had no particular meaning to me. It represented a quick march unimpeded by opposing forces, a metaphor, say, for a powerful football team that ran over an inferior competitor. But then I came to live in Georgia.

There I learned that Union general William Tecumseh Sherman was no joking matter. He had said, “War is hell,” and proved it in 1864 by conducting scorched-earth pillage from Atlanta southeast to the Atlantic. For Georgians in the late 20th century, Sherman’s march remained an open wound.

I bring this up because, as I have removed Sherman from my list of metaphors, I now retire one of sports writing’s favored adjectives. We have all read about miraculous plays and moments of high drama. They have been described as “heart-stopping.” OK, let’s talk about hearts that stop.

Maybe you’ve noticed that hearts have been in the sports news a lot lately. It’s like an epidemic of heart deals. Aortic roots and open-heart surgeries. A stent. An infection. Catheterization. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Angioplasty. A defibrillator on the bench. A death in bed.

Two NBA players, Ronny Turiaf and Fred Hoiberg, had open-heart surgery to repair flawed aortas. Redskin Coach Joe Gibbs had a cardiac catheterization, and a stent was placed in an artery to increase blood flow to his Hall of Fame heart. Mike Martz was forced off the Ram job because of a heart infection, and his interim replacement, Joe Vitt, also underwent cardiac catheterization, but he avoided a scheduled angioplasty in which a tiny balloon would have been used to open a coronary artery before diminished blood flow killed the heart.

Jason Collier, another NBA player, 28 years old, died in his sleep. Doctors learned through autopsy that Collier’s heart was so enlarged, 70 percent above normal, that it produced an irregular rhythm resulting in cardiac arrest.

Another pro basketball player, Robert Traylor, like Turiaf and Hoiberg, had open-heart surgery for a bad aorta, the large vessel that carries blood from the heart. Had their aorta walls burst, the three young men would have died immediately.

Yet Eddy Curry, an NBAer who’d been through a heart arrhythmia episode last spring, refused the Bulls’ insistence that he submit to DNA testing for a predisposition to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

Then, just before Thanksgiving, Red Wing defenseman Jiri Fischer, 25 years old, suffered a seizure on the bench late in the first period of a game. When team physician Tony Colucci could not feel a pulse -- cardiac arrest, the result of ventricular fibrillation -- Colucci used a defibrillator to restart Fischer’s heart.

Even the youngest and strongest of us can be suddenly dead. One minute Hank Gathers is flying, an All-American-caliber basketball player, 23 years old. The next, dead. Reggie Lewis is the Celtics’ captain, alive until suddenly dead. The cause in both cases: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease that thickens the heart muscle until it no longer pumps blood efficiently. Though Pete Maravich was born with one coronary artery instead of two, he became one of the great basketball players ever -- only to die in retirement, during a pickup game, age 40.

These heart complications are detectable by test. But even medical associations don’t call for universal testing of athletes. Definitive tests that would discover rare conditions are expensive; with millions of athletes, the tests are not cost effective. Instead, team physicians are advised to take thorough family histories. If a family history suggests possible trouble, tests should be done; the most complete noninvasive test is an echocardiogram.

I, for one, learned valuable information last February.

Dear readers of long memory know that I passed out in a hospital lobby. I had fun with that column, but I stopped short of telling the full story. Now seems the time to say that after passing out, I awakened in an emergency room with people hovering over me. Somebody said, “We beat on your chest. There may be some bruises.”

They ordered a stress test. For that they glue electrodes to your upper body, attach them to a machine and start up a treadmill. A cardiologist watches a graph of your heartbeats. A technician operates the treadmill and another stands behind you, just in case. The hospital folks wanted to know more about my passing out deal. The idea was to get my heart rate up, see what happens.

Five minutes and 6 seconds into the stress test, the cardiologist shouted, “Stop it, stop it!” Meaning stop the treadmill. As I lost consciousness, I heard the doctor shout, “Shock him, shock him!” That is a heart-stopped moment.

So they hit me with the defibrillator.

And two days later, they put in a stent.

And now I’m again young, strong and alive.

We should all be so lucky. We should all take care.