After my husband’s heart attack, we joked we’d hold a memorial for Taco Bell, once a mainstay of our seventeen-year marriage. Our courtship entailed after-work spin classes followed by crunchy tacos and bean-and-cheese burritos, no onions. Hot sauce packets imprinted MARRY ME teased the potential arc of our bond.

“We are spinners,” we’d say, any time we faced a challenge in the life we’d come to share. Even if he was the spinner I’ll never be: the front-row grinder every spin teacher loves, the guy who’d completed the Sierra Death Ride and roped friends into “hikes” up and down Mount Whitney over the course of a very long day. The guy with the goal of living to one hundred.

We became morning spinners once we both retired, opening the door to post-workout breakfast burritos, the grilled ones with just-add-water eggs and greasy potato pellets. Not to lay all blame on Taco Bell. When we moved from California to New Mexico five years ago, we embraced the chile verde vida. Green chile strips, green chile cheeseburgers, and green chile pizza sauce. Chile rellenos stuffed with tensile strands of melted cheese. Sopapillas straight from the fryer, drizzled with honey. You can’t go wrong with the mom-and-pop cafes in rural towns all over the state.

The apex of our food tour of New Mexico involved margaritas at a bar on the Turquoise Trail with burgers packing batter-fried chiles and a piquant aioli. My husband snapped a photo with his phone.

“Will you look at that bad boy,” he said.

*

Two days later, he left the spin studio before cooldown. I found him sitting hunched on the back bar of a leg press machine.

“I’m hypoxic,” he said. “Get help.”

The gym manager called 911. We helped him lie down, and I rolled his hoodie to place beneath his head. First responders assessed his symptoms: pallor, profuse sweat, tingling extremities and a dull ache in the chest. They transferred him to a gurney, and rolled him into an ambulance where they administered blood thinners. They called from the road to inform me he was having a heart attack.

“Did they use the siren?” I’d much later ask.

“Oh yeah.” Wry laugh.

By the time I got to the ICU, a stent replaced the arterial occlusion, and he was breathing with ease.

*

The interventional cardiologist who’d placed the stent was waiting for me. He showed me “before” scans of my husband’s LAD artery, the primary vessel that feeds the heart, completely blocked by plaque. He handed me the stent implant card my husband must keep in his wallet all days forward. His demeanor was humble when I thanked him for saving my husband’s life.

A few days later, the cardiologist on rotation greeted my husband.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You survived the widow maker.”

*

I wish I could say we’d been blindsided. My husband has high blood pressure, and a family history of heart disease, although, as he remembered it, his dad lived into his eighties despite two open heart surgeries. After the heart attack, his brother reminded him their dad died only a year older than my husband is now.

Earlier in our marriage, I tried.

I bought a no-sodium cookbook and learned how to make salt-free bread. I made him lunches of salad and dinner leftovers, to spare him the food trucks at the refinery where he worked as an engineer. We ate clean.

Until he retired and embraced a pattern of “I’m going Lowe’s” that included a burger and fries and a large soda. Call it a habit reclaimed from his teen years, when he put in twelve-hour Sunday shifts running his dad’s gas station. He’d take two bucks from the till, run to Burger King across the street, and order two burgers, fries, and a Coke.

“You know that food is full of salt,” I’d say, not even considering all the bad fats.
He’d shrug, solid in the belief hard workouts were enough. He prided himself on a drenched gym shirt, on the sweat pooled beneath his spin bike. “Lake Kenny,” he’d say.

I shrugged. I began to cave to the inconvenience of his food limitations, not only salt, but also allergies to onions and dairy. Store-bought bread slid back into our pantry. My use of sodium-free broth in recipes devolved to low-sodium broth with an extra pinch for flavor. Better yet, by the time we moved to New Mexico, it was just easier to eat at restaurants or bring home Taco Bell.

*

Now, he takes medicines to regulate blood pressure, control cholesterol, thin his blood, and prevent plaque clinging to the stent. He attends cardiac rehab, consisting of lectures and supervised workouts, three times a week. I work to purge our mealtime repertoire of salt and more than a minimum of fat. Terrified of food whose contents we can’t control, we only eat at home. I peruse heart health cookbooks, and find too many recipes containing onions.

One kind friend suggests chopped sweet pepper sautéed with ground chicken is nice in taco salad. Another recommends using garlic powder, smoked paprika, and ground chipotle in lieu of salt. I find six meals I can rotate through every week, with one night of leftovers. I stock the freezer with salmon filets and four-percent-fat ground beef. I make sourdough bread that rises just fine with two rather than ten grams of salt. He helps by prepping salads, and grilling chicken I’ve marinated in lemon and herbs. He often shops for groceries.

But I drive the implementation of food reform, which is probably why the surgeon made sure I saw those scans.

*

I’ve been angry.

Like when we were driving south through Colorado, eating on the fly. Our healthiest road-stop option was a hamburger no-mayo-no-cheese. My husband substituted a salad for fries, but then added a third burger to our order. We were thirty minutes out of Cortez and three-quarters through his second burger when I breached the “give the guy a break” barrier.

“You didn’t need two of those.”

Then I let it rip: the fat in the meat, the salt in the bun, the I-have-busted-my-butt-to-make-sure-you-eat-healthy. And, “Dammit, now I have to figure out food to bring on road trips.” Roadside eating, our last fun thing.

He returned the burger’s remains to the plastic clamshell on his lap. I felt like I’d just kicked a teenage boy working a twelve-hour shift.

“You may as well finish it,” I said.

“Nah, I’m good.”

Later, he asked for the salad, and I passed him veggies and clumps of iceberg lettuce.

*

While intense aerobic activity won’t punk heredity when it comes to heart disease, it will help you survive a LAD heart attack. Once he was admitted to the ICU, caregivers flocked to see the guy who beat the widow maker. That he’d taken the hit in a spin class cemented his celebrity.

“You just got a return on your investment of all those years doing cardio,” one nurse said.

And it’s true. His training had produced collateral arteries that performed when his LAD artery failed to deliver. His prognosis is good, and now he’s the guy who asks his trainers for permission to up his heart rate; to extend his time on the treadmill, stationary bike, elliptical, and rower from fifteen to twenty minutes each. We’ve resumed road cycling a few mornings a week, and soon he’ll be cleared to attend spin class. He’ll return to the front row and ride the standing sprints in high gear, breathing like a locomotive. He’ll have no restrictions.

While I’ve given up on spin. Arthritic knees. Inflammation. Not wanting to be where the widow maker was.

*

“We” are spinners no more. But we do eat lots of lentils: green, yellow, and red. Lentil soup with a dump-ton of kale. Shrimp is easy to cook, so I’m relieved to learn its cholesterol content is offset by its good fats. I am vigilant with food labels and wary of peanut butter and crackers the nutritionist at cardiac rehab said were okay to eat. I wince as he reaches for the ketchup bottle. He brings home Lightly Salted Fritos, and I ask if he’s bothered to check their fat content. I quote studies that state eggs are fine, just not more than six a week.

I am that wife.

And also the one compelled to kiss him goodbye every time he leaves the house, uttering a formulaic talisman of words:

Do you have your phone?

Be careful.

I love you.

Don’t overdo it.

Then I watch from a window as his truck exits onto the road.

*

We’ve learned from our mistakes. The new food regimen serves us both, and I believe we’ll stay the course. Still, I dread the day he goes back to spin, Taco Bell leering from across the highway.

As if he’d lapse into those old ways. As if he’d ever choose to go away and leave me behind.

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