Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [104]
Hiram Bingham wasn’t interested in slowing down, though. He had presented to the world his Grand Unified Theory of Machu Picchu. Now all he had to do was prove it.
FORTY-TWO
Second Chances
Between New York and Lima
John and I exchanged a few e-mails in the weeks after I got home, then he disappeared on one of his long excursions into the mountains. A couple of quiet winter months passed, during which the only communication I received from him was a short note saying he was spending a few weeks in Lima. This seemed a bit out of character as John wasn’t particularly fond of big cities. Then one morning my e-mail inbox pinged and there was a message from him, with the subject “TRIPLE CABG!”
“Hi Mark,” the note began. “How are you? It’s now been a month since I had a major health trauma, i.e., serious problems with my left coronary artery.”
Just after we’d parted, John had been walking up a flight of a few hundred stone steps in Cusco when he felt a dull pain behind his sternum. A few similar episodes followed while he was engaging in his usual strenuous recreational activities. It was during a four-hour cycling trip through the mountains of Suriname (riding a one-gear bike, naturally) that the pain spiked enough for John to realize he’d better get to a doctor. A cardiologist in Lima gave him a stress test. “The angiogram showed I had three serious blockages of my left coronary artery,” John wrote in his e-mail. “Two of the blockages were greater than 85 percent.” He went in for an eight-hour triple bypass operation a week later.
“Those first couple days after the procedure were awful,” John told me on the phone the day after his e-mail. “I woke up with a tube down my throat, completely unable to move, coughing blood. There was a nun reading the Bible over my bed.”
If John felt any just-happy-to-be-alive euphoria, it was fleeting. “What they don’t tell you about heart surgery is that you get depressed,” he said. “I was in bad shape for a month afterward, physically and mentally.” He still sounded a little blue. John was proud of his ability to defeat any physical challenge through effort and concentration; the heart trouble had obviously left him rattled. He’d been told his days of carrying eighty-pound packs uphill were likely over.
“My surgeon says it’s genetic—not enough HDL cholesterol, the good stuff,” he told me. “All the sport and walking in the Andes that I’ve done might’ve been what saved me. My heart was stressed so hard when I was younger that whenever my problem started, my circulatory system began building new pathways to pump the blood through. As it is I’ll be taking five pills a day for the rest of my life.”
John paused. “You know, my father died at fifty-seven, same age as me. He was always so busy, vice president of his firm, president of the Royal Perth Golf Club. I was twenty-four when it happened. I felt like I hardly knew him.
“It’s funny, for the last five years, as I got closer to fifty-seven, that’s always been in the back of my head. You wonder if your heart is telling you, ‘I’m not working properly.’ I’m always aware of gut feelings. They usually mean something.”
I’d never heard John sound so melancholy. “Did you have anyone to look after you in the hospital?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a little hard with no family around. You really need someone there twenty-four hours a day for the first two or three weeks. I have one Peruvian friend who’s been a bit helpful. And Paolo’s been here in Lima, of course. He’s visited a few times.”
Paolo was Paolo Greer, an old friend of John’s from the expat community in Cusco. He’d been the person who