Pittsburgh Penguin Hall of Fame star Mario Lemeiux has the heart to play championship hockey.
He just doesn’t have the heart to play it anymore.
It’s not that he’s lost the love of the game or his skill to play.
His heart has literally lost the ability to compete.
I should know.
I’m being treated for the exact same thing.
What we share is something called Atrial Fibrillation, AF to the med folks.
It’s an electrical problem where the current that is supposed to shoot straight down the heart in that classic thump-THUMP instead dances across the top of the ventricles more like a thumm-thumm-thm-thum-THUMP. It reads like five heartbeats instead of one making the heart work a lot harder and faster to pump out the same volume of blood.
One of the medicines that is given for that is called Cardizem, which works to slow down your entire system to keep the number of beats per minute under one hundred. It’s a great medicine for rapid heartbeats but as you can imagine slowing down your system has the strong side effect of fatigue.
When I was on Cardizem I could get exhausted just sitting at my desk.
I couldn’t imagine standing up let alone chasing professional athletes half my age around an ice rink.
I have no idea what Lemeiux’s doctors are doing to treat him, but I have a sneaking suspicion that what finally made up his mind was not his heart but his legs.
After a brief procedure several weeks ago my heart is back in a normal rhythm and I am off the Cardizem.
Most hearts that go into AF at some point will do so again, so it is a situation that must be monitored for the rest of my life.
The condition is rarely fatal by itself but if untreated can lead to an increased risk of clots and stroke and premature wear-and-tear on the heart muscle.
But there’s also no reason to doubt that with treatment Mr. Lemeiux and I can both lead long, active and productive lives.
Mario Lemeiux is a classic combination of persistence, skill and grace, his will to play overcoming crippling back pain and even cancer.
Now it’s time to take care of that body that threatened to desert him but also gave him his greatest successes and opportunities.
He owned the game from the ice. Now he’ll have to do it from the owner’s box.