Markham Shaw Pyle, historian of the George Washington - Selina Huntingdon correspondence, the events of that portentous year 1937, Congress' decision, four months before Pearl Harbor, to keep the draft (by one vote), and the investigations into the loss of RMS Titanic, looks back on his 2014 heart attack and triple bypass, his recovery, and the missed diagnoses, misdiagnoses, and dangerous consequences of thirty years' untreated illness.
A long essay at once harrowing, hopeful, and hilarious (never put a writer on a morphine drip: he'll hallucinate about typography and book design), Mr. Pyle looks candidly at the humiliations of colitis, the vagaries of having a vagus nerve that's trying to kill him, the dubious joys of having a heart attack on Halloween, the trials of recovery, the life-debt he owes to the physicians, nurses, and staff at Houston's Memorial Hermann Heart and Vascular Institute, and the surprising livability of life after illness.
From the time the other local hospital got shut down inadvertently by "Deputy Brangus and his Merry Men" to his first onset of illness in law school, to the stresses of losing both parents in a span of eighteen months and the surprising ways in which support is found in unexpected places, Mr. Pyle looks with wry candor and his accustomed wit and style on the ills flesh is heir to - or legatee of, if there's Will. And finds, as he hopes others suffering from the same ills may find, that there is, always, hope, after all.
About the Author: Markham Shaw Pyle, author of "Fools, Drunks, and the United States": August 12 1941, and of Benevolent Designs: The Countess and the General: George Washington, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, their correspondence, & the evangelizing of America, holds his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington & Lee. He is a past or current member of, inter alia, the Organization of American Historians; the Society for Military History; the Southern Historical Association; the Southwestern Social Science Association; the Southwestern Historical Association; the Southwestern Political Science Association; the Virginia Historical Society; and the Texas State Historical Association. He is the co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; '37: the year of portent; Freedom, Fascists, Fools, & Frauds: Bapton Books Position Papers and Other Critical Pieces, 2011 - 2014; and the acclaimed When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults).