Outside the hospital room the nurses come and go, tending to bells and baths and paperwork.
The rain drums insistently on the window: A tropical storm is bringing up to a foot of rain to parts of the East Coast. The worst of it is falling farther south, in the mid-Atlantic, where cars will be swept from roads and coffins torn from graveyards.
Here in coastal Connecticut, the rain is at worst a mild annoyance to the man lying in the hospital room.
He is almost 62, wiry in build, with a hawklike nose and the mien of one who is forcing himself to be patient. He is waiting to find out exactly what his doctors saw the day before, when they ran a catheter through his body and into his damaged heart.
As a lover of technology and creativity, he is quietly fascinated by the idea that a beating heart can be analyzed, diagnosed and treated in a way that allows the patient to sit up the following morning and eat scrambled eggs and toast.
But his enthusiasm is tempered by proximity. He would rather appreciate this sort of medical derring-do through a four-page spread of color photos in Life magazine. But this is his heart, his arteries, his body in the hospital johnny. This is entirely too close to home.
He is roughly 13 months removed from the heart attack that left him fighting for breath, unable to rise from his bed.
If there is anything keeping him calm on this rainy impatient morning, it is the desire to avoid that helpless feeling, ever again. This procedure, he tells himself, will help the doctors give him the best possible diagnosis — one that allows him to wring every last day from a life that seems more precious and tenuous than it once did.
It will give him more time with the daughter he hopes to walk down the aisle; with his first grandchild, who was just down to see him two months earlier; with his wife and elderly mother, who wait at home.
Waiting.
On this second morning of summer, it feels like the doctors are trying to extend his lifetime by making every minute pass as slowly as possible.
He fidgets, shifting his weight. The rain peppers the window. The nurses bustle from room to room, talking of dosage charts.
He lets his mind stray to the tropical storm and feels sheltered, protected. No rain will drench him; no flood currents will draw him away. There are walls and a roof between him and the storm, and people to take care of him.
That reminds him where he is, and the comfort evaporates. He is in a hospital, surrounded by sick people. Other sick people. His heart isn’t working right, and there is no shelter or escape from that.
He will get out of the hospital later that day, as it happens. But the unpredictable condition of his heart will be a fact of life for as long as he lives. It is a storm that will not pass, a flood that will never completely subside.
He closes his eyes but sleep evades him.
June 21-22, 1972.
Hope Street 
Nice writing. Hopefully you and I never have to go through the very thought processes you so artfully describe here, but I fear the odds are genetically against us.
Fact check: Your grandfather is almost 62 at this point (born August 1910). And literally reading the calendar (is there any other way for my father’s notation?), he had the catheterization on the 21st and was discharged the next day at 3:15. And well enough to buy another damn lottery ticket (I never knew about this).
As I’ve said before on this blog, one of the things I’m proudest of my father for is how much he changed after his heart trouble, allowing him to live more than 28 years after the calendar post above. So many vows are made in Intensive Care which are broken in the ensuing months. People lose weight, only to put it and more back. People buy exercise machines which end up rusting from disuse. People swear they will learn to relax. Or people adopt the puffery that “no little heart attack is going to make me change my lifestyle”. All with predictable and disastrous results. My father really changed. You never knew him when he was obsessed with the clock, tense, itchy, driven, worrying. He really became a new man, and made it to 90 years, quite an achievement for the body he was dealt.
Will go in and correct the age. Not sure why I mistakenly thought he’d been born in 1912.
With regards to the date, my fictional scenario (we are mingling fact and fiction here, after all) assumes he had the procedure on the 21st, as indicated, but they waited until the next day to tell him about whatever they’d found.
I have no idea whether that’s realistic or not. Maybe in real life they debrief you an hour after the procedure’s done. Or maybe they make you go back to your doctor’s office in two weeks to discuss it.
I’m just making stuff up out of whole cloth, pretty much, based on the assumption that the docs would have wanted a little time to look at what they’d seen before they told the patient about it.
Yes, nice writing about a tough topic. If I remember correctly, he did have to wait some time before the results were revealed. He did chill out for the most part after the heart attack, except for a few times when he decided he had to do a vigorous chore, and then your Grandma would follow him around until he stopped!