I'm not ready for this!

My sister Job had a heart attack yesterday.

Okay, her name isn't really Job, but I've often thought that is the "right" name for her. She hasn't suffered the losses that Job did, although life has dealt her probably more than her share of disasters and disappointments, all of which she has weathered with strong faith and good humor and love.

Even the heart attack didn't change that. By the time I saw her—five hours after the attack and surgery—she was alert and cheerful, reveling in being alive even though she was ticked off about being stuck on her back in a hospital ward where she couldn't do much but lie flat.

It had started around 11 o'clock in the morning, when she told her husband she felt nauseated, then she felt pressure around her heart, then pain running down her left arm, then a blurring of vision. The Alka-Seltzer and the aspirin her husband brought her didn't make it go away, so he called the doctor and the hospital before whisking her away to the nearby emergency room.

By the time I got to the hospital several hours later (feeling pretty guilty about having had to go to work for a while first), she was "having a procedure" somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, and her husband was taking a lunch break in the hospital cafe. He told me the story so far, including that the doctors had Roto-Rootered and vaccuumed out the blockage in what they called "the widowmaker" artery, inserted two stents where they had removed two clumps of extreme damage (one of which had ruptured), and gotten her functioning again.

When we got to go in to see her, she was already in remarkable shape for a person who had been through the experience she had had: her skin was sallow and she looked really vacant without her makeup, but she was warm and friendly and spent the next several hours chatting and joking with me and her husband.

Before I left, she was alert enough to make jokes about the hospital food she was getting (although her supper last night was clearly better than her meals in CCU today), but she was decidedly resentful about having had a heart attack. Aside from the fact that she has tried for some time to take better care of herself, her health focus has for years been on the breast cancer that killed our mother and has manifested itself since then in our sister and her daughter; heart attacks, as Job said, are for the men in our family—they killed our dad at 56 and our brother at 64.

She relaxed a little when I reminded her that our grandmother had had a pacemaker installed at some time in her 102 years. Although neither of us could remember when, we were both convinced that Nana event was probably in her middle 60s, which we recall in our grandmother as much older than Job, who is 63 herself. But that, of course, didn't seem to either of us to equate with Job's major heart attack.

I am hugely grateful that she is still alive, and I am equally hopeful that she will come through this will relatively little damage and great promise for a long, bright future. But I hate seeing her hurting, even though she insists the pain is only local where needles went in and nowhere near the heart.

But I'm just not ready for this!