The doctor had told me, “Your valve won’t need treatment for a long time. We’ll just keep an eye on it.” So every year I would get my heart checked. He would listen to the murmur and say, “There’s nothing to worry about, just stay in shape and keep your cholesterol low” and blah, blah, blah. And I’d push the problem out of my mind for another year.
Eventually, when they told my mother that it was time for surgery, she refused. “When God wants to take me, I’m ready to go,” she declared.
“That’s funny, you didn’t say that when you had your hysterectomy,” I pointed out. “And you’ve fixed every other health problem all along. So why all of a sudden now with the heart are you are talking about God? God is the one who made the science possible. God trained the doctors. It’s all in God’s hands. You can extend your life.”
“No, no, no.” It was one of those Old World things. Still, even without the repair, she seemed healthy enough and was now seventy-five.
But I wasn’t fine. The first sign of real trouble came after making
I didn’t feel any more symptoms and continued doing my thing. I skied, I made movies, I went to Planet Hollywood openings, I did my public service. But at my annual checkup in 1996, the doctor said, “The moment has come. You need heart surgery. It doesn’t have to be tomorrow, but do it this year.”
I visited three hospitals to talk to the surgeons. I believe you should get three opinions when facing a big medical decision. The doctor I chose was Vaughn Starnes at the USC University Hospital. He was a trim guy with rimless glasses who was totally matter-of-fact about the problem and the risks. He also could understand where I was coming from.
“I love your action movies, and I want to see you keep making them,” he said. “So I don’t want you running around with an artificial valve.” The better course was to put in a replacement valve made of living tissue, he explained. With a mechanical valve, I would have to take blood thinners and limit my activity for the rest of my life. But with an organic valve, “You can continue doing stunts, you can continue doing sports, you can go skiing, you can go motorcycle riding, horseback riding—whatever you want to do.”
That was the upside. The downside was risk. The particular procedure he recommended worked only six times out of ten. “I want you to understand that in sixty percent to seventy percent of cases the surgery works, but in thirty percent to forty percent of the cases, the replacement valve fails,” he said. “Then we have to go back in and try again.”
Big risk, big reward. That made sense to me. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll take the risk.”
We scheduled the surgery for immediately after I finished
I didn’t tell anybody about my heart surgery. No one knew. Not my mother, my nephew, my kids or anybody. Because I didn’t want to talk about it. To ease my anxiety, I pretended that it wasn’t really heart surgery; it would be more like getting a wisdom tooth removed. I would go in, get it done, and then go home.
I didn’t even want to tell my wife. Maria was in the middle of a difficult fourth pregnancy, and I did not want her to be upset. She had a tendency to blow things up into high drama, even things that were not life and death, whereas I would play everything down. For instance, I would never tell her, “Three months from now, I’m going to Norway for a speech,” because from that point on, she’d fret that I would be gone that week and she would be by herself. She’d be relentless: “What flight are you going to take? Why leave on Saturday rather than Sunday? Do you really have to go for that long? What are those two extra meetings?” By the time I got on the plane, I couldn’t enjoy it because I’d talked too much about it. So I always told Ronda and Lynn, “Never share my calendar with anybody,” and I would tell Maria only a few days in advance. I’m a person who does not like to talk about things over and over. I make decisions very quickly, I don’t ask many people for opinions, and I don’t want to think too many times about the same thing. I want to move on. That’s why Maria always said I was just like her mother.
Maria is the opposite. She’s a genius with medicine, and her method is to flesh everything out by talking to a lot of people. She’s an outward processor, while I keep things bottled up. I was afraid that if she did that, word would get around before I had surgery. I also was concerned that she would second-guess me so that every night there would be a discussion. I needed to be in denial. I’d made my decision in the doctor’s office, and I never wanted to deal with it again. If she were to bring it up all the time, then my denial trick wouldn’t work. It would disrupt my way of coping with life and death. So I felt it was better never to let Maria know until just before the trip, or in this case, just before I went to the hospital.
As the surgery approached, I let Dr. Starnes in on my plan. “I will tell my family that I’m going to go to Mexico,” I said. “I’ll say I need a little vacation for a week. And then we do the heart surgery. You said I will be out of the hospital after five days. So after five days, I’ll go to a hotel. I will lie in the sun and get tanned, I will look healthy, and then I’ll go home, and no one will even know I had heart surgery. How about that?”
The doctor seemed a little surprised. He looked at me and then said in his straightforward manner, “Won’t work. You’ll have pain, you’ll need help, you’ll never be able to fake it. I strongly recommend that you tell your wife. She’s pregnant. She should be included. I would tell her now.”
That night I said casually to Maria, “Interestingly enough, do you remember I said one time that someday down the line I will need to have the valve replaced? The doctor has a slot available for me in two weeks, and I said to myself that’s actually a good idea because if I do it right now, I’m in between movies, and I don’t have to go to Europe for the
Maria said, “Wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute, are you telling me you need heart surgery?”
It was as if I’d never talked about it before. From that point on, she did talk about it continuously, but she also helped me keep it secret. My mother was staying with us for her annual spring visit, and we didn’t even tell her.
The night before I was due at the hospital, I shot pool until one in the morning with Franco and a bunch of friends. We drank schnapps and had a great time, and I didn’t tell any of them where I was going the next day. Then at four in the morning, Maria got up and drove me to the hospital. We used the family van, not the fancy Mercedes. At Maria’s suggestion, I’d arranged to be admitted under a different name. The parking attendant was expecting us, and we got whisked into the garage. By five I was being prepped and hooked up to the machines, and by seven o’clock the surgery was in full swing. I loved that. Go in at five, start the surgery at seven, and by noon it’s over. Bang, bang, bang. At six o’clock that evening, I woke up ready to shoot some more pool.
Well, that was the idea. They agreed to dress me in my Hawaiian shirt after the surgery so that when I woke up, I’d feel like I wasn’t actually in the hospital. That was the whole theme. Sure enough, it worked. I woke up, saw Maria sitting there, felt fine, and went back to sleep. When I woke up again the next morning, Maria was still there, and I glanced over and saw a Lifecycle stationary bike that had been ordered for me to use later in the week. Within two hours, I was out of bed and on the bike. The doctor came in and was stunned. He said, “Please, you’ve got to take this Lifecycle out of here.”
“There is no resistance on it,” I said. “It’s just for me, for my head, that I am sitting on the Lifecycle right after surgery.”
He examined me and was pleased with my progress. But that evening, I started coughing. Fluid was building up in my lungs. The doctor came back at nine o’clock and ordered a bunch of tests. A little later, after Maria went home to see the kids, I tried to sleep. But the coughing got worse, and soon I was having trouble getting air. At three in the morning, the doctor came back in. He sat down on the bed and held my hand. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but this didn’t work. We have to take you back into surgery. I’m putting together the best team. We are not going to lose you.”
“We are not going to lose you. Just hang in there tonight; maybe we’ll give you some medication so you
