description: Healthy 44-year-old Deborah Daw Heffernan--a nonsmoker with low cholesterol and low blood pressure, who ate her vegetables to boot--lay down one day on the floor of her yoga class and felt her heart explode. Her heart attack--followed by a failed angioplasty, a double bypass, and eight days of unconsciousness--nearly killed her. During her recovery, she found plenty of books about heart disease and women, but no first-person stories--even though cardiovascular disease is the number-one killer of both men and women. An Arrow Through the Heart is the intensely personal account of her experience of surviving a heart attack, and how it changed everything. Graphic details bring to life for the reader what happened to Heffernan. Her sisters enter her hospital room and see "a thrashing torture victim staked to the bed." Her swollen throat makes her look like "an inflated giraffe." She describes her postoperative depression, her lessons about love, her acceptance of impermanence, all in a well-written narrative of her heart attack that is woven through with snippets about her family and past. --Joan Price 
language: English
title: An arrow through the heart: A woman's story of life, love and surviving a near fatal heart attack
titlecomplete: An arrow through the heart: A woman's story of life, love and surviving a near fatal heart attack
genres: Nonfiction
ratings_count: 57
publisher: Doubleday