I was visiting heart patients at Glenbrook Hospital on a recent Thursday , something I and another chapter member do regularly to provide emotional support. I walked into one woman’s room as she was finishing with a nurse and saw that she seemed to be in considerable pain.
“Why is God keeping me here,” she lamented in a loud voice to the nurse. The nurse did not answer. The woman, still in destress, saw me standing quietly by the door. “This spiritual man is going to tell me,” she said to the departing nurse.
How would you have responded?
The patient quickly told me she’d had a series of heart issues in her life. Several times her heart had stopped and she was technically dead. Yet the wonders of modern cardiology had brought her back.
Why? she asked me again and again. She had reached old age, her children were grown, many of her friends were gone and her ex-husband had recently died. Why was she still here?
“I can’t answer that,” I told her in my best calming voice. “But I can tell you everyone in our group has asked themselves that question. I know I have. And my answer was… to help others. That’s why I’m here today with you.”
Normally, we Mended Hearts visitors just stand by a patient’s bedside and give them handouts on our chapter meetings and Mended Hearts national programs. But on that day, I decided to sit down and just listen to her.
That turned into the longest visit I’ve had with someone since sitting with one of our chapter members a few years ago as she was dying of heart failure.
I left both those meetings emotionally drained but hoping I had done some good for each. Or, why else am I still here?
My need to help is why I founded the North Shore chapter of Mended Hearts eight years ago. Hopefully our meetings, speakers, community outreach and hospital visits have helped some.
None of it would have happened without Debbie Jefferson, our liaison-cardiac staffer at Endeavor Health.
In recent years, I’ve worked with national Mended Hearts to try to start chapters at other Chicago-area health systems but all those attempts have failed for lack of a dedicated staff person to get speakers, meeting space and, mostly importantly, buy-in from health system bureaucrats. Debbie has done all that and more for us.
Our two other trained visitors, Sherri Gould and Michael Lorsch, also have been tremendous helping hands, able to speak with heart patents who have had much more serious and involved procedures than I have.
But we need more chapter members to step up, please. This is the first year I sent out e-mails asking for topic ideas for our upcoming year’s meetings and received almost no response (only Michael gave me some top-notch ideas).
I ending up creating the list with the help of an artificial intelligence tool, ChatGPT. That made me very sad.
When I started the chapter, I hoped I could live for another five to 10 years to really get it established. I’ve made it through to now, a miracle in itself, and the prognosis for 10 years looks good, although we all know that could change in an instant.
So please volunteer to help. I’d love to turn the chapter over to new leadership in two years.
The most common reason chapters shut down is that one person has been leading and he or she dies or just gets tired. I heard when I started this that Evanston had had an older chapter that ended that way.
I really don’t want that to happen again.
So please, find it in your heart (repaired or otherwise) to offer some help. There are a lot of activities we could do with more volunteers. More active chapters around the country provide roadmaps for that.
We’re all still here for a reason, many reasons really.
I firmly believe that one of those is to help, so please do.
Just email me at johnnfrank@gmail.com and let’s talk.
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