Singing to my heart's content: learning to sing without inhibition restored me to health after my heart attack - One Reader's Success

At a Glance

Brian Michael Hassett, 60
Meadow Vista, Calif.

PROBLEM: I suffered a moderate
heart attack and wanted
to prevent future attacks.

OBSTACLES: Many years of
bottled-up anger and grief.

SOLUTIONS: I learned to
recognize my feelings and to
express them through singing.

CLIMBING OUT OF BED ON A bright July morning last year, I had a heart attack. My wife rushed me to the local emergency room where they gave me an EKG and administered blood thinners to break up the clot that was obstructing blood flow to my heart. After a night in intensive care, I was transferred to the cardiac intensive care unit of the University of California at Davis, where doctors used angioplasty to open a blockage and then implanted a stent.

According to the doctors, I'd suffered a moderate heart attack and my heart had sustained minimal permanent damage, if any. But the attack left me shaken. My chest felt clenched and my voice was faint in my throat. My head hurt and I had dizzy spells.

The doctors signed me up for a six-week regimen of exercises that intensified as my arteries healed. These exercises, along with adjustments to my medications, helped relieve my dizziness and the aching in my head. But my mind was full of questions. I worried that I'd always be weak.

Off-Key

Determined to tip the odds in my favor, I did some research at my local library, and luckily I found Program for Reversing Heart Disease (Ivy Books, 1996) by Dean Ornish, M.D., a holistic heart specialist. Ornish's belief that people can heal their hearts through a program of diet, exercise, and stress management gave me hope. In response, my wife and I cut down on meat and dairy products.

But my hope was short-lived. About a month after my attack, I had my first outpatient visit with a cardiologist who suggested that my heart problems were completely the result of my genetic makeup. Crestfallen, I went home believing that my efforts so far had been futile and that there was nothing I could do to save my life.

The next morning, however, I realized that although I couldn't change my genes, I could change my cardiologist, and I promptly did so. My new cardiologist shared Ornish's holistic approach and talked to me in a frank, engaged manner. Our discussion rekindled hope in me, but it also challenged me to change. "I get a strong sense of inner tension from you," he said at one point. "You should work on stress reduction because you seem pretty bottled up."

My wife had been giving me the same advice for a long time. I knew that over the years I'd learned to suppress my anger or to express it as irony, because that was socially acceptable. And I rarely admitted that I felt afraid or ashamed or sad. But was I really so bottled up that I'd damaged my arteries and my heart?

Tuning Up

One day I looked through our family photographs with that question in mind. In a photo taken in 1965, the year my first child was born and my brother died, I eye the camera warily, my mouth in a tense line. In a snapshot taken 15 years later, my three children stand in a row with me behind them, my jaw clenched like a stern patriarch. That night, as I brushed my teeth, I smiled into the mirror, hoping to see my lighter side. But only the stern face in the photographs stared back at me.

I knew that my face hadn't always looked this way. Falling asleep, I remembered a photo from my teen years: My brothers and I had been singing and we struck opera poses for the camera. The spirit the moment captured is lighthearted and playful, and I'm smiling.

In those days, singing was part of my life. My brothers and I sang Gregorian chants in the choir, Christmas carols around the tree, and doo-wop from Top 40 radio. I sang in the bath, in tunnels and hallways where my voice reverberated, and with my girlfriend driving back from the beach. Recalling how singing used to make me feel both lighter and deeper in spirit, I realized that one of the things bottled up inside me was my voice.

The next day I signed up for singing lessons at a local music school, a lively place where music pours into the hall from behind closed doors. I felt uncomfortable when I realized the other students were much younger than I, but I knew that if I was going to sing, I had to get over it.

With Gusto

My first session was devoted to singing scales. My teacher, a tenor named Chris Bello, showed me how to drop my chin and let the sound pour out, round, full, and unimpeded. He taught me to breathe from my diaphragm with my nose and mouth open: "Open up, open up," he'd say. "Tightness squeezes the sound." He helped me relax the grimace through which I usually sang: "Unclench your jaw. Drop your mouth wide open, the way a fish does when it breathes in the water."

Practicing my assignment, the Italian song Caro Mio Ben, alone at home, I felt timid about unleashing the energy that singing requires. But I opened up as best I could and the sound coursed through me like a healing balm. Over the weeks I learned to relax my larynx and flow up and down the scale past my voice's previous breaking point.

While I'm singing, my lungs and rib cage expand and my throat relaxes as I inhale and exhale. I feel a stretch in the bones and muscles of my face as I project the sound. At first this effort made me weak and dizzy and I worried I might collapse. But now my throat and lungs are so relaxed by this opening up that I often yawn deliciously halfway through my vocalizing exercises. When I sing, I feel glad again, young again, hopeful, light-hearted, and free.

I've been singing for a year now. My headaches and dizziness seem to be gone for good, and my cardiologist says my heart looks like it's back to normal. But I know that I'll always be vulnerable to future heart attacks, so I'm still exercising and eating mostly vegetarian. And since my first impulse will probably always be to suppress my feelings, I don't plan to ever stop singing.

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Brian Michael Hassett, a newspaper feature writer, has three grown children and three grandchildren. He sang romantic ballads at his son's wedding last fall.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Weider Publications
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group