Having a heart attack is no easy feat to recover from, some people don’t even get the chance to see the light of day again. Jim Lehrer’s heart attack was life changing for him but not in a bad way. Today I will be discussing some of the good things that came from his heart attack. 

The first thing he did, was set lists for himself to accomplish. Starting with food and over all body heath department he said in his book “Never, ever smoke again, never get angry again, never again eat barbecue, pizza, hamburgers, French fries, chocolate fudge, Milky ways, Butterfinger chips or Tex-Mex food, exercise regularly and exhaustingly, take a nap every day.” Next is a list of bus signs he wanted to collect “Overland Greyhound, Bowen Motor Coaches, Southeastern Stages, American Buslines, Dixie-Sunshine Trailways.” The last list is the major priorities he will do every day in every way “love, relax, write.” Later he was thinking that stress might have caused the heart attack, so he wrote another list to stop the things that stress him out “riding the Eastern Shuttle to New York, going to big cocktail parties, going to small cocktail parties, talking on the telephone, driving to work, listening to whining grown-ups.”

Now that this is out of the way let us start the good things that came from his heart attack. On Christmas day the president of the united states called him, and he talked with Mr. Reagen like a normal person for about 90 seconds. The second thing is he started to write fiction again, because he didn’t know how long he could live for, could be 5 years or shorter, so he decided to pick it back up again. He started to have pain in his chest again which indicates that he’s going to have another heart attack, so he had to go to the hospital and the doctor told him had to get a bypass operation. He asked the surgeon what’s his success rate and the surgeon said “98%”. After the operation, the desire to smoke was gone even after 30 years of smoking. While he was recovering, he went to this gym where he met three men, eventually getting really close to them. They also were recovering from near death experiences too and began all working out together. They shared everything together and the communication they had was vital to his recovery.

As stated in his lists, he pursued a complete dietary transformation; he listed all the things he had ate since he was 15 and had to stop eating them (they were all junk food) and made a new list of foods he had to eat. This list is going to take time for him to like it and he will have to self-discipline himself from a lifetime of bad eating habits. After some time in recovery, he started to work again because he got a call saying they needed him, so he started off slowly with only telephone conferences. After a little bit of working from home he felt he was ready to go back to work fully, so he put on his cloths and drove into town to the studio. The next step was for him to go to the nightly news.

Little by little he made a recovery back to a normal workload. Later he got the idea for a documentary about his heart attack. It was called “My Heart Your Heart”. He did the documentary to get people to think about their hearts, eating, behaviors, and if their lifestyles were calling their life expectancy in to question. After the documentary was made and it aired to the public, he got a lot of good feedback. He considers that as one of the best things he has done in his life and that it probably saved at least 1 to many lives!