Growing up, I never thought much about my heart.

It was simply a vessel that reacted to excitement, fear and pain.

I trusted my heart; I never considered it potentially deceitful.

That is, until my dad died of a heart attack at our local swimming pool.

When I was a teenager, my parents spent summer afternoons at the pool.

“Judith, why don’t you come?”

Oh, how I hated that place.

By 16, I was 6 foot 3 and 215 pounds.

I didn’t exactly blend into the background.

My father had suffered his first heart attack when I was 4.

(My sister stole a cigarette from my mother’s menopausal stash.)

Then, at 22, I met my girlfriend’s parents.

They smokedthreepacks a dayeach.

But even then, I was thinking more about my lungs than my heart.

I started exercising, swimming laps like my dad and running, too.

I met her in the waiting room, still in her bathing suit and a borrowed robe.

My father had been doing his laps.

He’d gotten out of the pool and was drying off when my mother heard a gurgle.

She looked up and saw his eyes roll back; he vomited and fell to the ground.

My mother told me she’d feared this for 23 years, since his first heart attack.

Life changes in a millisecond.

My father died a week later.

It took me a year to start swimming again.

Five years after that, I got pregnant, at age 38.

That’s when my own heart trouble started.

That happened again and again; it was a force I couldn’t control, like a natural disaster.

Everyone called me a hypochondriac.

(OK, I admit, thePhysicians' Desk Referenceis on my bedside table.)

Only my girlfriend humored me: “Go see a cardiologist.”

“A cardiologist?”

“Are you crazy?

Cardiologists are for fat men who eat greasy food, not for healthy people like me.”

Still, I went to see a cardiologist, who gave me a heart monitor to wear.

Still, they happened every few days, and they made me uneasy.

“Look,” I said, placing my girlfriend’s hand over my chest.

They brought me right in to see the doctor and took my pulse.

It was more than 200.

After my exam, I got up from the table and felt my water break.

I gave birth the next morning.

So I did nothing.

It also happens unpredictably, when I’m exercising or just reading a book.

I sometimes get annoyed that it’s disrupting my day, but I can’t ignore it.

I have to stop what I’m doing and take notice.

Sometimes I think it’s my dad’s way of saying hello.

My heart is a gift, one that reminds me of the sadness of living without a parent.

So now I plan to get surgery.