Second Chance

At a little after 6, on the evening of Oct. 7, 1947, Novelist Charles Yale Harrison, 49, was enjoying his second glass of sherry and listening to Mozart's Quartet No. 1 in G Major on his custom-made phonograph. The rewrite on Chapter V of his new novel had just gone well, and he was feeling fine.

Then he gradually became uneasy, nauseated and finally dizzy. An ache in his left arm moved slowly back & forth from shoulder to fingertips; his chest felt as if it were being tightened in a vise. Harrison, who had done some research on heart disease for a story, recognized the symptoms: he guessed, rightly, that he was suffering from a coronary thrombosis (plugging of a branch of one of the two arteries supplying blood to the heart). When this happens, part of the heart muscle loses its blood supply and becomes damaged (myocardial infarction). The persistent pain, he knew, was worse than angina pectoris (literally, a strangling in the chest), which passes quickly.

Six Weeks. Like about 80% of the victims of coronary heart disease, commonest cause of death from heart trouble in middle age and beyond, Harrison recovered from the first attack. For four weeks he was flat on his back in a hospital, for two more at his Manhattan apartment. Like about half the victims who are not manual laborers, he was able to go back to his regular work. First, he finished the novel he was working on, Nobody's Fool, published last September. Then he went to work on the story of his experience, Thank God for My Heart Attack (Holt; $2.50), published this week.

The title, Harrison writes, was chosen reverently: "You've been given a second chance in a world where millions are given not even a first chance. You feel like a condemned man who has been saved by a last-minute reprieve. Life, henceforth, will never be something to be taken for granted or spent with prodigality . . . Something happens to your way of looking at things after a heart attack. Your eye is no longer jaded or sharply critical, and sees subtle nuances in everything."

The book was written as a help to those he has come to think of as "cardiac cousins," Harrison says. He hopes that he can ease some of their fears, show that it is often possible for heart sufferers to live nearly normal lives. Harrison himself has had to make few changes. While still in the hospital, he talked his doctor into letting him have a cigarette after each meal. Now he is back to his old rate of a pack and a half of Pall Malls a day. Harrison, who is 5 ft. 8 1/2 in., has cut his weight from 212 pounds to 174. This part struck him as a nuisance, because he enjoys food, and is an amateur chef: he boasts of knowing 30 ways to cook a roast and 20 to 30 ways to make sauces.

He now works four or five hours a day five days a week, lies down an hour every day, gets eight hours' sleep a night. All in all, he gets more work done than he used to. He never liked strenuous exercise anyway, so he did not have the problem of giving up tennis and learning golf.

Two Brandies. Harrison had troubles with his own emotions. He knew that the "cardiac neurosis" sometimes turns victims of heart attack into invalids. His own fears made the new book hard to write: when describing his sufferings, he began to feel his old symptoms returning, and had to stop for a while.

The first day at the typewriter, after working for an hour, he got the old terrifying constriction in his chest and the pain in his left arm. He called to his wife Eva, who brought him a glass of brandy and promised to call the doctor. After a second drink she handed him a mirror, showed him that his lips were not blue, as they had been in his original attack. Then Mrs. Harrison, a schoolteacher who has learned practical psychology by handling 4-B children, confessed that she had only pretended to call the doctor. Harrison now recognizes his own neurotic symptoms, but he has not played the Mozart quartet since that October evening a year and a half ago.

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