An Arrow Through the Heart

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
Statistics are aerial photographs. The photographer in the airplane circling high above us looks for the big picture - where land gives way to water, where mountains rise, where the desert begins.

Chapter 1: Spring
There is a weight on my chest. Right between my breasts, pressing on my breastbone — as though the atmosphere ripped open a shaft from the heavens to me and the sky poured down onto this one spot. Observant, detached, slowing down, breathing careful

What if, like most women, you were overwhelmed by the struggle to balance work and family? So you did everything to be healthy and stress-free — ate right, kept fit, never smoked, practiced yoga. And what if, out of the blue, your body betrayed you?

Like most American women, Deborah Daw Heffernan worried about breast cancer, not heart disease, the nation's number-one killer of women. Yet on May 12, 1997, Deborah, a slim and health-conscious executive in her mid-forties, was stricken by a near-fatal heart attack in her weekly yoga class. There was no warning and no family history of heart disease. There was only the sudden explosion inside her chest. After emergency surgery and a harrowing string of complications, Deborah faced a long and uncertain recovery, overshadowed by the looming prospect of a heart transplant.

An Arrow Through the Heart is her unflinching, soulful, and surprisingly funny chronicle of that first year — which might easily have been her last. Anchored by the rugged landscape of Maine, by the fierce love of her husband, and by their two estranged families, who dropped everything to rally around her, she learned to do simple things all over again, one breath at a time. Ultimately, it was a year of healing both body and soul, of "finding meaning everywhere, like Easter eggs."

This book is about how illness, oddly enough, can give life back to us. For the tens of thousands with cardiac disease, it will be a welcome companion on the road to recovery. For the rest of us, Deborah offers a powerful testament to the unexpected joy that can come from living in a state of impermanence.

Deborah Daw Heffernan graduated from Georgetown University and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has worked as a teacher at the École d'Humanité in Switzerland, as an associate dean of The Program in Artisanry at Boston University, and as a freelance writer. In 1983 she became vice president of a corporate training enterprise in Boston and, over the next fourteen years, helped develop it into one of the top companies in its field — until May 12, 1997, the day that changed her life forever.

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