Nobody actually uses the phrase, "coronary breakdown", but if I say "heart attack" people think that I had too much cholesteral and a blockage in an artery someplace, clutched my chest in a pain-writhen way, and collapsed for lack of function. Well, it was not like that. First, I didn't clutch my chest at all, but my chest seemed to have clutched itself, and second, it was not in the least bit painful. It was the mildest, but not the most unusual of symptoms other than that, in that the squeezing of the chest was clearly happening, in a localized way, definitely at a location I was able to consider as having been my heart, and very soon after there were difficulties I felt in having the breath move, so I placed my mental and physical focus on maintaining breathing. By this, I used deep breathing techniques and pushed the air as if I was blowing up a balloon and sucking it all back in again in its cycle. While doing that, my ears by my hearing got muffled, and I felt alot like my head was going to burst at the top. Then that intensity passed, and I had the memory of the moment to consider. I sat in a chair, Jim was on the air, and I didn't tell him by email until about four hours later. Then, for five weeks of almost full debilitation I didn't email to him again. During that time, Jim had set up a voice mail so that I could read to him the counts of my pulse and my temperature readings daily. I took several readings and then gave him the full results.

The "coronary breakdown" did debilitate my body to the point where I was fully convinced that my spirit was its gracious guest and nearly expunged from it. My weakness was astonishing to me, and included the collapse of my diaphragm, and the requirement of an electric fan to operate in front of me to push air into my nostrils. I curbed my music listening activities to only four hours per day, instead of twenty hours. During one of those times, a disc jockey played Richard Pryor's Heart Attack routine, in which Pryor recounted the moments of his own heart attack in a humorous way, and for the first time I understood it so well that I was really rolling on the floor laughing at it. Except, it concernd me that this actually could have killed me then. I clutched my stomach to hold the place where my diaphrahm was supposed to be working, and the only sounds eminating from me in the laughter did sound like a seal barking. I turned off the radio when I felt that it was not an assured thing that I could survive the laughter. But as time and recovery went on slowly, these common things did restore to me. It took seven months before I was able to bring back full time contact and care to my cat who was content in the bedroom while I visited him for several minutes per day giving him his food, water and the necessary quota of affection. During the revelation period of familiarizing Jim with my condition, his mood was clearly somber. By the following year, I had developed methods by which to relax myself to encourage the better and healthier vital signs, which were both the goal and harbinger of good recovery. One of these methods was the ignoring of mass media. No news, no television, no radio other than the necessary and that actually made me quite ignorant about what was going on in the world. I knew about the election of 2000, though, and it was going on while I was recovering. I had newspapers being delivered to my porch, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. I was reading about how Ralph Nader was diluting the election choice by being a dickhead, and I was listening o the ways that Bush was being trumped ahead of Gore by a dishonest set of journalistic practises.