SYNOPSIS
Sudden Death (SD) is an autobiographical account of my encounter with Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD), a generally fatal heart failure that affects over 350,000 people in the United States alone each year. Only in the last decade or so has it been possible to talk with certainty about survivors of SCD, but with the advent of effective CPR (Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation) training, efficient EMS (Emergency Medical Services), Micro-Cardioverter devices and new drugs, the pool of people who live to tell about their Sudden Death experience is growing. I am one of those survivors.
This book describes my life at the time of the initial episode, when I was director of a center for troubled teens and their families, in SW Florida, a marathon runner and nascent triathlete, and an independent, happily married woman trying to get pregnant. It describes how the heart arrest and my ensuing blindness burst my bubble, how I almost lost my husband, how the ordeal fragmented and then reforged our families, and most of all, how I survived. The book travels chronologically from the day of the initial episode of SD, through my several hospital stays and on to the medical and mental recovery process. It provides flashbacks to my work with the kids at the Outreach center, to my own troubled childhood, to the "party years" in Austin, TX when I hung out with people like Texas millionaires known for breaking up royal weddings, to my marathon training, to my attempts to get pregnant, and to my relationship with my husband. Anecdotes from my family and my husband's family help illustrate the book's essential theme--that bad things can happen to anybody, but it's how you deal with them that determines one's future.
The book follows my unique journey from SW Florida (where I would lose my eyesight in front of my mother while trying to order from a hospital menu), to my harrying Medivac flight to Dallas to have a defibrillator implanted in my abdomen, to my Old family home in the Texas Hill Country (where I would struggle to regain my vision amidst the colors and sounds of a Mexican Market), to the beautiful Florida Keys (where I found myself snorkeling with a six-foot shark). It traces a camping trip that took me to wonderful places such as the Rocky Mountains (where I would hike peaks, have more heart "episodes," and finally lose my fear of death), my return to South Miami Beach (where Puerto Rican girls begged me for my long blonde hairs to bring them good luck), and then my journey to my pregnant sister's home near San Francisco (where I would have a major heart episode on the eve of the birth of my niece). Finally, the books describes my return to Dallas (where doctors would "lose" me twice on the operating table during corrective surgery), and eventually to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where my husband and I moved, built a new home, and provided me an environment for writing a book about the whole thing.
Sudden Death is about surviving and taking advantage of life's opportunities! It invites readers to contemplate a series of profound personal issues as they follow the journey of a woman who manages to turn what could have been the most devastating time of her life into one of the most fulfilling.
