Chapter 3. Getting to the Heart of the Matter

IT WAS ABOUT nine-thirty on a cold February night in 1981 when Arnie Spector first felt the pain in his right arm. He was working late in his pharmacy on the corner of Essex and Chestnut streets, in Lynn, Massachusetts, a business he had owned since 1960.

At first he ignored it. After all, a fifty-year-old man should expect a few aches and pains every now and then. But the pain in his biceps grew more intense, then excruciating. Fearing the worst, he phoned for a relative to drive him to a nearby hospital.

While waiting in the emergency room, Arnie felt pain in his chest, and his feet grew colder than they had ever been. “Please hurry,” he told the nurse. “I think I’m having a heart attack.” Feeling very sleepy, he tried his best to stay awake. “I felt that if I fell asleep, I’d never wake up.”

But he did lose consciousness, and did wake up, in a hospital bed the next morning, where he learned that he had suffered a massive heart attack. His heart had stopped beating for a minute and a half, and an emergency medical crew had had to defibrillate him. That explained the scabs on his chest. Shortly thereafter, Arnie underwent quadruple bypass surgery at New England Medical Center in Boston. Two of his coronary arteries had been totally clogged, a third obstructed 70 percent, and a fourth 40 percent.