Bundle of His

by Cynthia Litz

The third time Carolyn Dove died, everyone sitting at the kitchen table having coffee with her giggled. She had been sitting in her wheelchair, smiling and nodding, listening to the chatter of her two grown children, when, as she brought her green Mozart mug up to her mouth, she buzzed from within. Coffee sloshed out of her mug onto the table and she felt refreshed and stunned, then giggled. Her son and daughter saw her buzz—might have even heard it. The daughter reached over and wiped the drool from the left corner of her mother's mouth. The son called the cardiologist to let him know his mother's implanted defibrillator had indeed discharged. Carolyn said nothing, of course, since she had not spoken for years. The cardiologist sent word through his nurse that the defibrillator had done its job and to "carry on."

The second time Carolyn died she was fifty and dysthymic and accomplished; she held first chair clarinet in the Symphony. She was smack in the middle of a sweaty rehearsal of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto when her heart's electrical system took a wrong path. It took a few seconds before she hit the rehearsal hall floor. Her last words were, "I wanna go back to the Adagio." The paramedics successfully shocked her back to life after her brain had waited there hungry for too long. Experts in the electrophysiology of the heart located the trouble spot as her Bundle of His, and a tiny defibrillator was implanted in her heart. The first time it would need to shock her back was at the kitchen table.

The first time Carolyn died she was alive and young, a mother of two small children, a loving musician who felt special. When H-Dove, without warning, told her it was actually another woman whom he found special, she was shocked and never felt alive again. As he went down the driveway, she felt a flutter in her chest and for years was plagued by episodes of nearly passing out, which everyone blamed on emotional causes.

The fourth time Carolyn died they called in an expert. It was a neurologist who was referred to as "Dr. Death" in the doctor's lunchroom; he was widely published on the subject of deciding who is dead yet. Carolyn was hooked up to machines that ran on electricity. Dr. Death took a look at tracings of Carolyn's electrical brain activity and wrote down his diagnosis without hesitation. H-, who was now 60, was called in by his grown children to say goodbye to Carolyn. He held her hand but she was unresponsive to pain.

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