It happened in the City of Light, the City of Love—Paris.

I was invited to give a talk on the third day of a three-day technical conference. On Wednesday, I acted out a dress rehearsal of my Friday talk. Left my apartment with a backpack full of handouts, my computer, snacks, jacket, umbrella, Metro map, and everything else I needed to survive and flourish in a place where I didn’t speak the language.

I had mastered French for hello, goodbye, please, and thank you. I learned “excuse me” for travel on the Metro, but when I needed it, scusi shot out of my mouth instead of pardon because of my alacrity with a five-word Italian vocabulary. My apartment was in the Marais, and the conference was in Butte aux Cailles, whose literal translations were the “Swamp” and “Quail Hill,” but, no matter, the Metro map used French names for its subway stops.

The Metro was hot and crowded at that early hour of the morning, and the walk up the Quail Hill was more like a climb up Quail Mountain. When I arrived, I purposely avoided drinking any water so my prostate would not assert itself for an emergency pee-break during my 11:00 a.m. scheduled talk. I checked out my presentation on the audio-visual equipment. By lunchtime, I was confident that my talk two days hence would go off without a hitch. As usual, I had everything under control.

Later that afternoon, I descended into the tunnels of the rush-hour Metro. Down and down I went to take Line 6 to the Chatelet hub. Up I went to catch Line 7 back to my apartment in Marais.

Something unexpected happened.

Some engine inside the depths of my body lost its oomph. I stalled in place, unable to walk up one more step. I moved as inconspicuously as I could to one side, and sat with my loaded backpack between my legs trying to figure out what was happening. A month later, a cardiologist at Mass General Hospital confirmed that my mitral valve had ripped and was flapping in the flow.

I like to live like the locals wherever I travel. That afternoon, I joined the ranks of French street people, and if I had a scribbled sign, I could have earned a few euros in the hour I spent sitting on the Metro stairs. The truth is that when I finally limped up those stairs, took the Metro back to my apartment, inched up the two flights to get inside, and—insult to injury—up the ladder to the loft that held the bed, I had no idea what was going on.

I used my superior powers of logic, honed over decades of mistaken conclusions, to assess the situation. I didn’t know how to call the French equivalent of 911. I was locked in an eighteenth-century apartment behind a door that could withstand an attack from Napoleon’s army. If I somehow managed to find a hospital emergency room en français, they would diagnose me as dehydrated and pump me full of fluids, while I lay in bed for 24 hours. I had read Les Miserable. I’d be lucky to get a bed.

I took matters into my own hands, drank a couple of gallons of water and stayed in the apartment the next day munching left over croissants, baguettes, French cheese and a dish of pasta cooked up on a camping hot plate masquerading as a stove. Just in case none of that worked, I wrote down all the details in an email to myself so the French police could inform my family what had happened when they finally broke down the door and discovered the body.

Friday came. I gave my talk, skipped the banquet, abandoned my planned Paris photo shoot, and on Sunday flew home. My cardiologist hooked me up with a Harvard-trained surgeon, who had a master’s degree in Biochemistry from MIT. Because I knew the MIT secret handshakes, he started telling me the details of how he would drop my body temperature to 32 degrees Celsius, crack open my chest, and take my heart “off-line.” I have a vague recollection of a snip, a mesh, a ring and a sew, but around this time my conscious self checked out and a frightened little kid inside took over, eyes shut tight, hands over ears, head shaking no, no, no, while making a humming noise to avoid any input whatsoever.

I had fallen into an old pattern in my life whenever anything difficult happened—it’s the end of the world. Something that was math-difficult didn’t deter me. I could derive Schrödinger’s equation from Maxwell’s. No, it was life-difficult that threw me. It was as if I had inherited (thanks Mom) an emotional dystopia. An expectation that no matter how good things were, tragedy was just around the corner.

Somewhere around age 50, I had abandoned that pattern and changed my way of life. But in one particular instant on the Metro stairs of Paris, I forgot everything I had learned. Yoga, meditation and all those weekend workshops went out the window.

I once had a great therapist named Lydia. She had a list of twenty rules to live by. I only remember Rule #20: You will forget all these. I think they all boiled down to one simple lesson in life: the only thing that’s the end of the world is—wait for it—the end of the world.

But like it said in Rule #20, I had forgotten.

I find myself in a Woody Allen movie, lying in a hospital bed with tubes down my throat. I’m choking. Can’t breathe. The nurse who’s supposed to be watching for me to wake up is down the hall with the other nurses and a couple of young doctors. I can hear them laughing. They’re singing Happy Birthday to Brenda. Someone probably brought in a cake.

She’ll be back in a minute. I’ll hold still. Keep from gagging.

What’s she doing? Shopping for a doctor-husband and letting me choke to death. If she doesn’t hurry, I’ll pull the damn hoses out myself. Or I’ll die.

Wait. I remember reading that after open-heart surgery, they tie your hands down so you can’t pull the tubes out. Wouldn’t it be better to tether the nurse to my bed?

Don’t check your hands. You don’t want to know. You’ll panic. Where is she? Come on. Come on. I can’t hold out much longer. Don’t think about it. Shit, that makes me think about it more.

Someone help me! I can’t breathe. Jesus help me! I’m screaming but nothing’s coming out. My arms aren’t working, they must be strapped to my sides. I use all my strength to sit up. I feel the cold air swooshing past my sweaty neck and back.

And so it went. Night terrors. Night sweats. Just three weeks before the surgery, I was afraid to go to sleep, or even to sit quietly. Awake, I felt like Sisyphus, every muscle in my body tensed against a boulder halfway up a hill.  Asleep, I was careening down the first drop of a giant roller coaster into oblivion.

I informed the Twitterverse that my days were numbered. To stave off the panic attacks, I tightened every muscle in my body and blocked every sensory input to my brain. Mindlessly, I trolled the internet, searching for solace for the sick and dying:

“When we are,
death is not come, and,
when death is come,
we are not.”—Epicurus

It didn’t help.

Then the phone rang. It was Mary from the Yoga Place, a precious friend and teacher I met along the way in my years of abandoning my end-of-the-world philosophy. She said, “Your surgery is scary. Don’t ignore it. Feel it. But think of it as a coin. One side has the fear. The other side has another face: you are relatively young, healthy, you have great doctors and hospitals, and your family and loved ones are all around you.”

It was a simple image. Now I had something to do when the panic attacks came. If the coin landed on heads, I dwelled on it for a moment and flipped it to tails. Heads. Tails. Heads. Tails. Soon I got bored and stopped looking at the coin at all.

Sisyphus abandoned the boulder and walked up the hill. Maybe there was already a boulder up there he could use. As for riding the roller coaster of life, forget holding on tight—let go. Arms raised, let it rip. Let the scared little kid go for cookies and milk. The only thing that is the end of the world is the end of the world. Simple, but not easy.

The night before my surgery, I was as calm as a summer vacationer floating on a rubber raft down a lazy river. Panic City to Peaceful Waters. I even sprung for a room in a luxurious hotel near the hospital for myself, my wife, and daughter. At six the next morning, I checked into the surgical unit, mind and body in harmony. I’m certain that contributed to my rapid recovery.

I lived to tell the story, and maybe, just maybe, another more pleasing affair of the heart is ahead of me—Paris awaits.

Joseph K. DeRosa is a storyteller, and a writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is author of Vera’s Story: Escape to Freedom. He has also been published in several short story anthologies in the 2013 and 2014 Chatham 02633 series (Lulu Press). Raised in Boston, Massachusetts, he currently lives in Cape Cod and South Florida. As a leader in information systems, he has traveled the world teaching courses and giving talks. His soon-to-be-released novel, Six Minutes to Midnight, is a family saga and mystery that spans Boston and Naples, Italy—until the mystery finally unravels in Santa Fe, NM. Web Site: http://jkderosa.com  Twitter: @derosabooks Email: derosabooks@gmail.com.