Timm's heart trouble(s) - part 1

A self-portrait of Timm from 2003(?) or so, which he used in a photo Christmas greeting card. Timm's repose up top of a wild mountainscape to me is reminiscent of his living with his heart condition.

According to the death report filed by Dr. William K. Stiles, M.D. the attending surgeon at Salem Hospital, Timm died on April 18, 2008, from complications resulting from a heart attack - an "acute anterior wall myocardial infarction."

In the medical records mailed to Mother from the hospital, Timm's final hours are recorded in extensive and agonizing detail. Timm called 911 after suffering chest pains; by the time the paradmedics arrived, he was in great distress. Ventricular fibrillation paddles were applied twice to Timm in the attempt to normalize his heartbeat while he was being transported the paddles would be re-applied on a dozen more occasions over the course of the night. In the emergency room, x-rays showed that a thrombosis (clot) had massed in his anterior descending artery, the result of a lesion in the artery wall after built-up plaque had torn loose. Artery-reopening stents were injected into his femoral artery and the clot was largely dispelled, but there was damage to the anterior wall of Timm's heart that couldn't be repaired. Timm's vitals kept failing and twice he went into Code Blue.There was an attempt to insert an angioplasty balloon to reinforce the stents in the anterior descending artery, but by them his vitals were so low that no further attempts were made to revive him. Timm was declared dead at 2:55 a.m.

Timm's heart attack was very similar to the one that killed Tim Russert not long after, with a clot blocking the anterior descending artery causing the attack. The round-the-clock cable news coverage of Russert's death brought a great amount of attention on the type of heart attack that killed both Russert and Timm. Doctors were aware that Russert had a heart condition and he was taking medication (a cholesterol drug), exercising regularly and watching his diet. Russert had had a stress test in April and passed it with no concerns. These types of heart attack are very difficult to predict, and apparently even observed cases (where the attack occurs under medical care) have only a five percent survival rate. I don't think we should have any concerns about the care Timm received at Salem Hospital; he didn't really have a chance.

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Timm's history of heart trouble is a mystery; he never spoke of any such difficulties to his family. remains a mystery. Timm had had some hard knocks over the years. His head injury in 1981 was nearly fatal. The shock to his body must have seeded many aftershocks which stressed him. He suffered from skewed mental coordination, seizures and blurred vision; he had such a long history of accidents, his classic opening to a phone call to one or the other parent ran, "I'm fine, but you'll never guess what happened ..." Lasik surgery and Ritalin helped to stabilize some of the mental functioning. Timm chewed tobacco and smoked in the past. He drank though had been sober for 16 years when he died.. He like his meat (I remember him saying that as a teen). He put on weight in his early 40s; when he visited Florida he was a hefty 250 pounds. He got big enough to become concerned and turned to a vegetarian diet, losing 20 pounds.

Timm was an active guy who loved the outdoors. He cycled, ran, played tennis, hiked, camped, walked on the beach. He did it hard, though. A tough guy. We always thought that given his penchant for accidents he should be the last person to take up mountain biking but there he went. His battered mountain bike was strapped to the back of his SUV when we flew out to Oregon to attend his death.

Passion and heart: these were agencies most important to Timm, perhaps because he had to struggle so with them. Without access yet to his journals, I don't know how much he thought about his physical heart, but the struggles of his emotional heart show clearly in his photos and writings on his laptop. The penultimate of his sobriety was to live and speak and love from the heart; yet like his alcoholism, Timm's emotional troubles made the heart a thorny, wounded, and difficult place to reside in.

Perhaps his real heart troubles were echoes by his emotional ones, or vice versa. In a file on his laptop dated from 2006, Timm wrote about internal pressures which may have been heart-related though they were felt as something mental and spiritual:

It's like a tea kettle on a burner. Once it starts boiling, steam builds up inside. If I hold the lid open - pressure doesn't build up. But if I let the lid close, the steam builds up and the pressure rises.

During my drinking days the pressure was taken as a a) craving for alcohol and b) sign that a geographic ((change)) was needed.

After I first sobered up I was surprised that the "cravings" didn't go away. After about a year I began to wonder if what I was feeling was something other than cravings. Eventually went on meds that seemed to help - took the edge off.

(It)) really got bad when I quit smoking in 1994 - I guess I was self-medicating. Over the years I would leave jobs that were to sedentary (ASAP, Probation, State of Oregon) for those that allowed more freedom of movement - keeping the pressure from building up.

I'm going to guess that Timm was struggling with his job at Congresswoman Hooley's office, with inattention and restlessness that made a desk job so difficult. Straining to stay put, his heart would become restless in its cage, strainging to get free, beating wildly.

According to Christie, Timm suffered from sleep apnea, where his heart would stop while he slept, waking him up gasping for breath. She says he went to a sleep clinic in 2003 or so and the problem was helped.

To live in the heart is to suffer the full range of its moods and passions. Timm wanted to live there but feared a beast trapped in there -- call it animal instinct, repressed rages, suppressed libido. Passion is full of life-force but turns volcanic if it has to muscle up through its suppressions.

This poem, written in March 2006, expresses again the sense Timm felt of his heart as a dangerously wild yet vital beast in his chest:

The Wildness of My Soul

Timm O'Cobhthaigh
March 7 2006

How long I have forgotten the wildness of my soul
Under lock and key I've attempted to keep it stowed away
It rages; it howls, it's sinews strain against the will of mine to repress it.
Only allowing tame glimmers that I dare to conjugate.

But after awhile I tend to forget the creature that paces inside
And with sublimation I find a hidden place inside
I pull back the curtains and dust off the window
Allowing the noon day sun fall across the beast
And up he springs like a powerful geiser
Exerting his force yet again.

He rattles the bars with his pent up passion
Shakes the foundations with his power
His voice calls to my all to stand up and fight again.

His kind is not accepted in our tame and timid world.
He frightens us with his barbarism and reminds us we are weak.
He makes a scene with hardly a care for convention
He's uncorrigable, he is me and that's why he was banished.

But I can't help feeling he is who I was created to be.
Only through accepting that will I then truly live.
Out of the center and not from the man I truly wish I were.

"Magma7" was a username and/or password of Timm's I came across, used, apparently, to open the darker doors of the Internet he sometimes roamed, code perhaps for that beast of passion in his chest he could not live without nor sufficiently mediate. Perhaps Timm knew of his real heart troubles, enough to worry about its eventual eruption. Perhaps his subconscious personified his coming heart attack as a beat in a cage roaring to be free.

Timm's knowledge of his heart condition may have been much on the surface; it seemed to become so increasingly in his last year. Maybe he knew it well. Maybe he sensed it growing and growling at the edges of his history.

I can understand Timm's metaphor of heart and its complications. My region is further north, in my head, where I've suffered seizures and manias and depressions and migraines for decades. Recent research suggests that migraines root in the brain stem, the lowest region of mental activity. As Timm sought to go deep into the heart, I'm fascinated with low-brainstem stuff, our origins there, in the great unconscious animal mind which knows things my conscious mind can't or won't. I can understand how Timm knew and didn't know of his heart condition, and made of it a spiritual emotional and aesthetic issue: the sea beast we ride is the Lord of the Sea, we are only its rider, scanning the horizon, figuring out what to do next.

We'll never know for sure how much Timm knew of the condition which killed him at age 44. A coming post will offer some more details about Timm's final months; details which are important, I think, in remembering Timm, though we must be sure to mediate those hard facts with the golden images of Timm's youth - when all of his life stretched out in wonder -- and the images Timm recorded in later years showing what wonders were to be found on God's earth, in the heartland Timm mapped and walked and praised. To his last day.

I end today with another of Timm's waterfall pictures - by far the scene he photographed most and took such labors to master. One can't help but feel Timm's heart in it, pouring out, smashing vital waters down hard, filling a receipt down below and flowing on to a wild Pacific shore at the far end of all Timm's photos. Timm's waterfalls fill us with the sort wonder and pleasure that he felt was the healing that comes from Beauty: a moment torn from the present and nailed to the infinite with the Yes of a soul merged back with his God.

"Sol Duc Falls," Timm O'Cobhthaigh