I’m in the middle of an 11 hour flight to Buenos Aires, which is going to either be the start of an amazing adventure or the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. If I end up dead, it was the latter. In 2020, my father and I discussed the possibility of taking a cruise to Antarctica. I was lukewarm on the idea; besides the usual caveats about the environment most of the cruises seemed to barely sail past the continent, and I had already turned down an invitation from a friend to take one of those.¹ But my father found a cruise on a small ship² which not only stopped in Antarctica but also the Falklands and the South Sandwich Islands and the thought of seeing all of that sounded too good to pass up.

We booked it for early 2022, and I even hopscotched my way down through South America with the expectation I’d end up in Buenos Aires. I got there just as COVID restrictions and concerns about variants scuttled that one, and we got vouchers from the cruise line which we used to book for late 2022. Then shipbuilding delays meant they didn’t have a ship for us to sail on, so we ended up rebooking that for late 2023.

When I had a heart attack it looked briefly like we were going to have to postpone yet again, but I discovered we were inside the window where your cancellation only gets you 25% of your money back. And then while I hemmed and hawed — it still wasn’t clear how severe things were — we passed the deadline even for that.³ When the doctors in Poland told me definitively to avoid flying I basically wrote the trip off.

It came as a genuine shock when my UK cardiologist gave me the go-ahead to fly. It’s a bunch of factors. I had a month to rest. The clot in my heart isn’t free-floating so it’s unlikely to cause problems. My heart function is stable. I haven’t had any atrial fibrillation.⁴

That’s not to say travel is totally safe. If I were being maximally cautious I’d have stayed home, near a hospital.⁵ I’m at much higher risk than I used to be of my heart beat slipping into something approximating acid jazz and crashing my circulatory system, but I’m not so ill that this seems foolhardy. Although I’m going to be incredibly embarrassed if I do end up dying in the latter half of this flight.⁶

Left to my own devices I would have crisscrossed my way down through another set of South American countries on my way to Buenos Aires but my father’s reached the point that they’re uncomfortable traveling on their own. I would have been able to avoid this long-haul flight, which hasn’t exactly been fun.⁷

I only had three days in New York City, which was taken up almost entirely by errands. I needed to get my medications refilled because missing doses will catapult my risk of another heart attack up into unacceptable levels.⁸ I got a flu shot and a COVID booster, just solid basic precautions, and I bought a fancy smart watch which is supposed to take periodic ECGs but mostly just seems to drain its battery even faster than my smart phone.⁹

I was only planning on being back in New York for Christmas but given recent events I booked a flight back for almost all of December. I’m not quite ready to spend a month on my own. Maybe I’ll find my bearings by the New Year.

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Footnotes

¹ Sorry, Diana.

² Small, in cruise terms, is less than 1,000 passengers. I think this one is about 300.

³ I had a very bizarre conversation with a representative from the cruise line where they more or less encouraged me to commit insurance fraud. After I had been emailing back and forth with them for a few days they called me out of the blue to make clear the following points:

1. They could not and would not be offering vouchers or a refund

2. The cruise line strongly recommended buying travel insurance to handle these cases

3. Maybe I should call around to some travel insurance agencies and tell them I had a cruise booked but was worried my health wouldn’t let me go and see what they said

I declined.

⁴ In a sea of awkward and confusing medical terminology like “enfarction” and “ischemic attack” can I just give a shout out for how lovely the word “defibrillation” is? Everything else sounds absolutely horrid while “The Defibrullation” sounds more like a 20s dance craze.

⁵ Safe is, of course, a terrible yardstick. People keel over from heart attacks while poking around their gardens, and probably an order of magnitude more frequently than on airplanes. Flying for me is less safe than it used to be but maybe not unsafe?

If I were really being maximally cautious I’d have stayed on the ground, moved closer to a hospital, and maybe swaddled myself in bubble wrap, but diminishing returns and all.

⁶ I guess if you’re reading this I survived and posted it, so score one for team life. There’s still a cruise and a return flight to worry about, but at least if one of those does me in I’ll have seen penguins.

⁷ There’s been moderate turbulence throughout, not “angry baby with a rattle” levels of bad, but bad enough. Let me tell you, whatever industrial-strength beta blockers they’ve got me on are doing yeoman’s work, here. My heart rate’s barely budged. Normally I’d be white knuckling the armrests by now.

⁸ My primary care doctor didn’t have any appointments but when they found out the situation they made a point of booking me in anyway. It’s that important not to skip a day.

⁹ I also had my computer inexplicably stop charging and didn’t trust my ability to fix it before we left so I had to run out and rent a notebook computer for a month. I spent most of Saturday before the flight setting it up, which in my case primarily meant I installed Baldur’s Gate, watched it successfully sync my saved games, noted it ran like a donkey drowning in molasses, and uninstalled it.