Tim Russert Saved My Mom: Preventing a Tragedy

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YOU HEARD IT, TOO: the buzz around the office June 13 at about 3:50 p.m. "Can you believe it? He was so young. Unbelievable."

Tim Russert wasn't supposed to die. His asymptomatic coronary artery disease was under control with medication. He exercised; he was healthy. People like him just don't have unexpected heart attacks.

Russert was 58. He had shared the same decade as my dad, 54, and mom, 52. A parent's mortality is something no child is ever ready to admit. I wasn't.

The following Tuesday night was one of those summer evenings that seemed God-sent. The oppressive 90-degree D.C. heat had briefly subsided, blessing Washingtonians with a scrumptious day in the 60s.

I was prepping for a bike ride with my sister, Tracey, when I heard her outside my room. Her voice sounded strained, odd. "I've got something to tell you that isn't good. I might get weird and start laughing in the middle of telling you, even though it's not funny."

Two and a half hours later, we dashed onto an elevator in the lobby of CJW Medical Center's Chippenham campus in Richmond. Dad had called five minutes earlier to say, "Uh, they just said visiting hours are over, so look like you know where you're going." We needn't have worried about sneaking in. No one paid us any particular mind as we reached IVCU Room 6.

There was Mom. Beeping monitors, IV bags and jelly-like tubes jutted out from her thin body.

Nothing can prepare you for it. The moment you realize the woman who took care of every bump and bruise, consoled every sob story and joked about lifting the marriage rule so she could get some grandchildren for crying out loud isn't unbreakable.

She opened her eyes, drowsy from the drugs she'd been given after surgery. "Thanks for coming."

The previous night she'd woken up at 10, feeling a little heartburn. For a woman who's lived her entire life with a heart murmur, a little chest pain here and there was hardly uncommon. Three years earlier, she'd undergone a catheter ablation that stopped occasional "fluttering spells" that could reach 220 beats per minute. The procedure burned off the nerve tissue that triggered her rapid heart beats.

As a result, she could now tackle things she'd never dared: She worked out regularly on an elliptical machine and, when my parents took a trip to Banff, Canada, she hiked Lake Louise's perimeter. She'd always been slender from her freakishly fast metabolism but still stuck to a healthy diet. She didn't worry anymore.

"It's like that Tim Russert; he did everything he was supposed to," Mom said to one of her sisters the next morning. "I was thinking of him, and I had a friend last week who had a heart attack. With the combination of the two, I thought I'd just go to the hospital. Even if it was stupid. If it was nothing, it was nothing."

A 95 percent blockage in a major artery to the heart isn't "nothing." I was mystified: How did this go undetected? Mom went to a cardiologist annually. It didn't add up.

"There were no signs, no acute pain," Dad explained. It was a matter of electricity versus plumbing. The focus had been on how her heart worked; there hadn't been a reason to scrutinize the blood going to it.

Her doctor informed us how wise she'd been to come in. With a blockage of that magnitude, a massive heart attack wasn't probable; it was inevitable. The stents he inserted into her arteries saved her life. It could have been hours, days or months. But she would have suffered a massive heart attack that she wouldn't have survived.

The front page of Express on June 16 featured a picture of Russert's son, Luke, mourning at his father's "Meet the Press" desk. I can't begin to grapple with the devastating loss this man must be feeling. To lose a parent who was so young makes the world come crashing down.

Thanks to his father, I've yet to experience this heart-wrenching pain firsthand.

How do you express gratitude over a tragedy that prevents your own?

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images