I Had a Heart Attack at 28...these were the first 90 days
- Feb 1
- 7 min read
These are the three recovery chapters that serve as a continuation of my article on BuzzFeed.
RECOVERY, CHAPTER I: DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR
There is no chat room or subreddit for young women recovering from heart attacks — at least none that I could find. The recovery narrative is almost entirely written by men in their sixties, and none of it includes what a heart attack can do to a young woman’s body — like briefly, and misleadingly, relieving endometriosis pain.
Although I was technically on leave in August, it didn’t feel like it truly began until mid-October — partly because I was in a daze, barely able to move, and partly because of the sheer amount of process required to get my leave approved.
I needed to apply for short-term disability leave, which meant I needed a doctor’s approval.
I died in the office.
I died in the office on camera.
But yes — paperwork. Cool, cool, cool.
My doctors were resistant to filling out the forms, insisting I make an outpatient visit first. I wasn’t well enough to get back into the city from the Hudson Valley for several weeks. I missed a paycheck, because I was technically on leave without my leave being approved — which sent me into a sobbing spiral so intense my mother drove up to see me.
When I was finally well enough to make that outpatient visit, my cardiologist failed to send the right forms back over to my leave coordinators. So I had to follow up, and when the paperwork finally got where it needed to, they had only approved my leave until October 2nd. Less than two months — after death — from a heart attack. I figured out a way to extend my leave until December, which had been my original plan.
I had only one regret from my “first life”, as it were. I had one ex who was exceptionally good at manipulating people. And, against my better judgment, I fell for it more than once. If I had stayed dead, I would have regretted not telling him off. So I FaceTimed him and told him I didn’t wish him well, and that if we ever found ourselves at the same event, he should stay away from me.
Not long after, I was at a restaurant in Poughkeepsie when a stranger, after hearing what had happened, asked me — earnestly — if I was upset that I’d been brought back.
I found that hilarious. It made me think of when (spoilers) Buffy is brought back from the dead in season six of the show. She was in heaven, and it takes her a while to adjust to being alive again.
I was enjoying the delusions of grandeur that come from being revived. My mindset became: this is a bonus round. However, that feeling came with a quieter, heavier question too — why I was spared, why everything lined up so that I didn’t stay dead. I am still not ready to answer that, especially in the beginning, so I hid behind jokes instead. “If I had stayed dead, my obituary would have been incredible — so much potential.”
RECOVERY, CHAPTER II: WHAT THE F***? NEVERMIND, IT WAS BETA BLOCKERS
People have a limited capacity for holding other people’s grief, especially when there is no visible sign that something is still wrong. I don’t fault anyone for that. But the people who supported me most intensely in the beginning had mostly moved on by about day fifty. I hadn’t. It felt like we were all seated at a table, and one by one everyone stood up to leave — alone or in small groups — while I remained seated, panicking, unsure why I wasn’t ready to get up when everyone seemed to think I should be.
Taylor Swift’s “I’m Right Where You Left Me” captured it exactly:
Help, I’m still at the restaurant
Still sitting in a corner I haunt
Everybody moved on
I, I stayed there
At my follow-up cardiology appointment, I was prescribed beta blockers for my irregular heartbeat. This is typical of modern medicine: defaulting to medication even when it’s a blunt instrument for a subtle problem. Beta blockers are useful for anxiety and blood pressure, but they also flatten the emotional landscape. I gave them sixty days. Everything felt muted. Gray. I credit my ability not to collapse entirely to years of learned resilience — my well-practiced ability to power through suboptimal situations.
The problem with anything that alters your brain chemistry is that it feels like the reaction is you. I wasn’t motivated to do anything. Life felt flat, even pointless. I couldn’t tell whether this was depression, a post-trauma response, medication, or just me.
That changed the morning after the opening of a restaurant in New York. I had met one of the most thoughtful figures in modern hospitality, had a warm conversation, and still couldn’t feel the meaning of it. The next day I read about beta blockers and found story after story that mirrored my own. That clarity made the decision simple: I would taper off the medication.
The first day, taking a half dosage by biting one of the pills in half, I had an intense panic attack while standing on my patio, completely safe from any real threat. After that first day, the negative side effects of withdrawal mostly subsided. My baseline anxiety returned, but so did my sense of self.
One superpower that the beta blockers temporarily gifted me to was a lack of social anxiety, which I am trying to keep with me. Messing with my neurochemistry has taught me that much of how we see the world is chemistry, not character.
I understand now, having come off the beta blockers, that much of my reaction during this second stage of recovery was heavily colored by their impact on me, but I want to leave it mostly as is, as that’s what I was feeling at the time and, credit to Dumbledore, just because it was in my head doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. I know now that much of what I felt during this phase was medication-colored, but that doesn’t make it less real.
The first stage of recovery made sense. I was sick. This stage didn’t, because I was better — just not well — and there’s no social script for that. I wondered if I should be ready, if I was milking it.
The first chapter of recovery gave me delusions of grandeur and a massive sense of entitlement. I felt special because I was “saved” and assumed, therefore, that life was going to be easy, a bonus round that just delivered to me on a silver platter whatever I wanted. That is not the case. The universe doesn’t care about that.
I was at dinner at El Camino in the East Village with Leo when he asked what the hardest part of recovery was. I didn’t need to think long.
“That it’s invisible.”
Once I looked “normal,” people assumed I was normal. That’s when my closest relationships became even more important and I clung to them more. My mom, Diana, and Jeff knew all the ins and outs and were comfortable to go slow with me and still treat me with kid gloves. But everyone else had an opinion, some of which were surely projections. “Go to Bali for a month”, “Oh, you could…”. I don’t blame them. Even I didn’t know what I needed. But the accumulation of advice felt like pressure to perform recovery correctly.
My therapist compared my short-term disability leave to maternity leave. No one expects someone recovering from physical trauma to travel internationally. Why did they expect it of me?
I try not to internalize other people’s projections anymore. Curiosity is kinder than assumption. “How are you today?” leaves space. “You must have had so much time off” closes it.
Recovery is not just rest. Sometimes it’s Pilates. Sometimes it’s sleeping without alarms. Sometimes it’s staying out late dancing with someone who makes you feel alive again.
The heart attack also convinced me it would happen again — and next time I might not come back. That belief pushed me into an all-gas, no-brakes mode. Urgency masquerading as appetite.
I stayed out too late. I said yes too often. I bounced around the city like the parent was asleep and the child was in charge. It took a while to realize that freedom without structure is just another form of harm.
There was no known cause for the heart attack, so I tend to believe it was E) all of the above: COVID leading to overall inflammation, my irregular heartbeat, and perfectionisting myself to death.
I don’t yet know what I was meant to learn from the heart attack. I believe it matters — that it’s part of a larger story, whether mine or someone else’s. I don’t believe events like this are meaningless.
Was it meant to be a blunt reminder to slow down — that my perfectionism and people-pleasing are not just exhausting, but dangerous? Was it meant to push me toward a different life, a different kind of purpose? I don’t know. Where I once worried about disappointing my mother, I now find myself worrying about disappointing something much larger. Which feels like exactly the opposite of lowering the stakes.
RECOVERY, CHAPTER III: ENOUGH NOW
I think I’m ready to get back to something like normal — or at least to stop letting my life be defined by recovery and the heart attack.
That will take time — for me and for the people around me — but it’s one of my next intentions.
There’s a reason memoirs are usually written at the end of a life — everything makes more sense in hindsight. I don’t yet know what the meaning of the heart attack was. I only know that I wasn’t “saved” for a specific task but instead for a different relationship to my life.
I haven’t fully figured out what the new way is yet. And maybe that’s okay. For now, I’m allowed to be in between — grateful, curious, a little uncertain — and still moving forward. ❤️