Editor’s Note: This is the second part in a series of excerpts written by Dana Langston.
Chapter 4: The Internal Shift
We are living in the “waiting room” now. The LifeVest is a bridge, but the destination is surgery. Soon, a surgeon will make an incision near my collarbone and tuck a metal sentry—an Internal Defibrillator (ICD)—under my skin.
It’s a terrifying shift. You go from wearing your protection on the outside to having it stitched into your very being. It’s an admission that this isn’t a temporary “glitch”—it’s my new reality. I find myself touching the spot where the device will go, wondering what it will feel like to have a machine guarding my heartbeat. It’s the fear of the unknown, the “what ifs” of the procedure, and the realization that 49 looks a lot different than I ever imagined.
Chapter 5: The Small Joys
Can we fix a broken heart? Maybe we don’t fix it back to the way it was. Maybe we build a new version of “strong.”
When your world shrinks to the size of a porch and a recliner, the “small” things start to glow. I find my joy in a morning without a LifeVest alarm. I find it in the way the Kentucky sunset hits the trees. I find it in the fact that, despite the heart attack and the 26%, I am still here to see my grandkids smile.
My heart might be struggling, but my spirit hasn’t failed. We take it one beat, one breath, and one day at a time. I am still a wife, a neighbor, and a fighter. I’m just learning to fight at a slower pace.
Chapter 6: Discarded by Design
In the world of corporate checklists, there isn’t a box for “my wife’s heart stopped.” We found out the hard way that to some employers, you are only as valuable as your attendance record. When my heart attack hit, my husband stayed by my side— exactly where a husband should be. But instead of compassion, he was met with a pink slip. He was fired because my “failure” was an inconvenience to their schedule. It added a layer of financial terror to an already desperate situation, turning our fight for my life into a fight for our very survival. It is a level of coldness that’s hard to put into words—to be discarded by a job you gave your sweat to, simply because you chose your family over a clock-in time.
Chapter 7: The Mechanics of Mercy and the ’95 Corolla
If you want to know what love and loyalty look like in rural Kentucky, it looks like two men covered in grease, bent over the rusted engine of a broken-down 1995 Corolla. As I sit here in my chair, tethered to my LifeVest and fighting the bone-deep fatigue of a 20-25% ejection fraction, I watch them through the window. My husband and my brother-in-law have been out there for hours in the stifling heat, hands deep in an engine that’s almost as tired as my heart. They aren’t mechanics by trade, but they’ve become masters of necessity. My brother-in-law hasn’t just been turning wrenches; he has been our legs when mine wouldn’t work and our wheels when ours wouldn’t turn. He’s the one at the door, ready to run my husband to get whatever parts or tools we need. They are two men fighting a machine with nothing but grit and a prayer, while we both wait for the one thing we can’t fix ourselves.
Chapter 8: The Silent Phone
We are still waiting on the surgery notification for the internal defibrillator (CD). Every time the phone rings, my heart —ironically—skips a beat. Is this the call? Is this the day we trade the Velcro straps for the metal sentry? The waiting is its own kind of exhaustion. You’re suspended in time, unable to move forward but terrified to stay where you are. Until that call comes, we are a team of two: one heart pumping at 20-25%, and two men working on a 95 Corolla, both of us just trying to keep the engine running for one more day.
Part 2: The Struggle in the Gap
Chapter 9: The Gap: When the Checks Stop
A heart attack is an expensive disaster. We are currently living in “The Gap,” waiting on disability checks that may—or may not— ever arrive. It’s a mountain of paperwork while the mailbox fills with reminders of what we owe. Some jobs don’t care if your life just shattered; if you aren’t there to clock in, you’re just a line item they can erase. This wait for the system to see us is agonizing; you realize quickly that the world keeps spinning and the bills keep coming even when your own pulse is struggling to keep up.
Chapter 10: The Vehicle of Survival
In rural Kentucky, if you don’t have a car, you don’t have a life. You can’t get to the cardiologist or the grocery store. Work won’t come without a vehicle. That’s why they are out there, bent over that Corolla. My husband knows that without that engine turning over, we are stranded. It’s a catch-22: he can’t get a new job without a car, but we can’t fix the car without a job. Every turn of the wrench is a prayer for mobility and a way back to a life that doesn’t feel so stalled.
Chapter 11: The Angels in the Wings
But even in the middle of this struggle, we aren’t starving. To my friends and family who see the grease on his hands and the LifeVest on my chest and don’t look away: thank you. And then there is my sister. Despite her own battle with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), she is here every single day. She does our laundry, helps with our animals, and makes sure we have a meal. She is the bridge over the gap we’re falling through, doing the hard, quiet work of keeping us human when the system tries to turn us into a statistic.
