Every day I can give thanks for the miracle of living and celebration, writes Rico Provasoli
The sun was unusually warm in Northern California that early December morning as I drove myself to the hospital. My daily power-walk had been interrupted by heart palpitations and shortness of breath. I’d never experienced such alarming symptoms. Waiting for a red light, I considered my life and the many times I’d dangled my butt awfully close to the edge. I had crossed the North Atlantic in a hurricane, soared the needle-like spires of the Swiss Alps in a paraglider, scuba dove alone to tangle with a moray eel in the Sea of Japan, trekked the majesty of the Nepalese-Tibet Himalayan trails after bribing my way out of a horrific foreign jail.
I parked in the hospital garage, checked my phone for messages and walked to the main entrance. That’s where I collapsed. Several people walked past me. It’s not that I looked homeless or dangerous; I wore clean blue jeans, a new pale-blue polo-collar merino wool sweater and my beard was trimmed. A gray-bearded, well-educated, East-Coast aging hippie.
I fit right in with the upper-middle path of the liberals in Marin County, across the Bay from San Francisco. Somehow, I got my second wind, staggered to the elevators, pushed the button, and then dropped to the carpet, too weak to stand. I rode three floors up to Internal Medicine, tried to stand in line, but dropped to the floor, incapable of anything else. I crabbed my way to the reception desk and paid for the visit, when the young woman noticed my shallow breathing.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“No, maybe heart attack,” I stammered between gritted teeth.
“Please take a seat. We will be with you shortly.”
The internist, white-haired, Hollywood-movie-star good looks, asked me two questions which I could only answer with a vague nod. The doc produced a bottle of nitroglycerin from his white coat pocket. “Keep this under your tongue. You are having a massive heart attack. We’ll have you in the ER in sixty seconds.”
In the ER, an assault of doctors and nurses swarmed my gurney like honeybees at the hive in midsummer. A young cardiologist, peach fuzz on his chin, looking all of twenty-one, slapped a nitro patch on my chest. A nurse set two IVs into my arm. I was flying in a cloud of euphoria. Dying? Who cares if they keep pumping this into me? I thought.
EKGs, CT scan, blood tests, auscultation to my irregular heart all confirmed multiple myocardial infarctions. “Don’t worry,” the peach-fuzz doc assured me. “We will get you to the cardiac catheterization lab to see what is actually going on. Worse case is you will need one or two stents. You will be up and about in two days, back to your old routine.”
Soon, I was floating on what they called the ‘I don’t care drug’ that left me semi-alert, not really caring about surviving or not. My cavalier attitude abruptly changed when the chief of staff broke the dream spell after thirty minutes of procedures, “I am most sorry to be informing you, sir, that you have five blocked coronary arteries. You have what we call the ‘Widow Maker.’ No warning, most people simply drop dead. You are most genuinely very lucky. Two minutes later and you would not be here, but your body would be in the morgue. We will be scheduling you for an emergency open-heart surgery.”
“Are you certain?” I slurred my words but kept going. “The ER doc said it would be a stent and then I’m home free. What changed your mind?”
“I am most heartily sorry for giving you this information, but here are the images. Clearly, you are most fortunate to be still with us.”
In a foggy daze I was wheeled into the operating room for emergency open-heart surgery; twelve hours in the OR, my heart stopped to provide a stable site for the delicate process, my lungs stopped as well to not disturb the team sewing new arteries in place. Machines pumped blood and oxygen through my body.
Late that night I woke up, my sternum wired together like a home-cooked turkey, with five new coronary arteries grafted to my heart from a vein in my leg. The next day the thoracic surgeon walked into my private hospital room with a grin wide as the Pacific Ocean just beyond the Golden Gate bridge.
“Mr. Provasoli, how are you feeling?”
“Please, just call me Rico, okay. And how do you think I feel with all these screaming wires in my chest and a slew of tubes going in and out of my racked body? Sorry, no disrespect, but I guess I’m still adjusting to having been taken down like this.”
“No problem. But I have to tell you that before we started the procedure I held your heart in my hands for examination and I’m pretty sure you’re one of my century patients.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t say this often, but your heart looked really healthy except for the clogged coronary arteries. Keep exercising and eating right and I bet you live to a hundred!”
For ten days I walked the halls of ICU, supported by an IV pole pumping meds to keep my heart functioning. I greeted every person as if they were the Prophet of Joy. Every breath was precious. “I’m not dead, folks! Isn’t that the most wondrous miracle! I’m alive and walking!”
When I was released, a friend drove me home, a true refuge from the clanging computers and overhead speakers blaring announcements everywhere in the hospital. When he tried to put me to bed, I refused. “I’ve been in bed too long. Help me get to the meditation cushion, I need some of that old-time Spacious Mind stillness.”
“What’s that?”
“Just a little bit of heaven, that ineffable quietude found on the Zen cushion.”
Neighbors fed me for another two weeks as I slowly started to walk outdoors. Word spread of the close call I’d had, especially with the story being repeated that the ER doc had said that two minutes later, I’d have been gone from the land of the living. People on the street started greeting me as the “miracle man.”
And most days since, that has been my constant prayer and reminder. Thank you for everything. No matter what is happening headline news on the computer, my dwindling bank account, my painful sternum held together with the twelve-wire memento of the assault on my body, an aggressive intervention by a team of surgeons who grafted five new arteries to keep my heart pumping.
Now, seven years later, regardless of the aching joints, terrifying bouts of asthma, the irregular sleep patterns with insomnia – sometimes leaving me frightened that sleep will never greet me again – the multiple visits to the bathroom during the nights, the death of more and more compadres I’ve journeyed with as we adventured across the globe, the sagging muscles on a body once considered fit and attractive by many, the constant fatigue and failing vitality – all mean nothing. Whether I am understood or not, my behavior approved or not, the phone ringing with love from family and friends or not, my literary achievements read by many or none at all are as significant as a straw fire aflame for but a moment.
Every day is Thanksgiving for the miracle of living and celebration of love and kindness. When the voices of complaining fade, when the most perfect Now arises as it is, with no commentary of how things should be – then, and only then, do peace and joy fill my days.
This might sound a bit high-minded, something only a Zen master might say, but it is my daily, down-to-the-bones experience. Did it take a heart attack to wake up and be present to the miracle, the gift of life? Apparently. But now that I’m on board this train chugging through the land of beauty, it seems worth the price.
This article was first published for Thanksgiving Day, on November 23, 2025 in goodmenproject.com – but always relevant
Featured photo credit to Getty Images for unsplash.com
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