Lewis Grizzard’s latest book nearly a heart stopper

I TOOK A LICKIN’ AND KEPT ON TICKIN’ (And Now I Believe In Miracles), by Lewis Grizzard, Villard Books, 243 pages, $19.

As a guy who has read many of Lew Grizzard’s 19 books, I well remember the early morning blurb on the radio one day last March stating that the best-selling author and syndicated humor columnist was in sad shape after heart surgery at Atlanta.

Complications had occurred — not the least of which was the fact that his heart would not start pumping after the operation — and chances of Grizzard surviving his third heart surgery in 11 years were considered by his doctors to be somewhere between nil and none at all. I kept looking for the next story that would announce his passing, but it never came and I always wondered how things turned out. Now I can see that the reports of his pending death were decidedly premature.

Grizzard’s fans will be pleased that he lived to tell about the ordeal with the flair that has made this laid-back Southern writer so popular with the Joe Sixpack crowd. Having endured the Heart Surgery From Hell, he felt that he was certainly entitled to get some extended mileage from it. (Hey — a columnist-author takes his material where he can find it.)

“Let us review exactly where I am at this point,” Grizzard writes of his initial 16-hour operation and subsequent healing problems. “I ain’t got a chance. My heart won’t work. I won’t wake up. My kidneys are trying to quit. I’ve got a fever and probably an infection. I could have brain damage. And it’s still two more days to the weekend. …”

Although the tale is comical in the whole, some passages that describe certain procedures and the ramifications thereof are not for prudes. But what description of a Serious Hospital Experience ever is? If you’re into priggish modesty a hospital is no place to be caught with your johnny riding up at inopportune times. Hospitals are for fostering the proper degree of humility, as well as for ministering to the sickly, as anyone who has ever spent time in one can attest.

Grizzard, though, shows us that the flip side of humility is humor, and since we don’t figure to get out of this world without swallowing our fair share of pride we might as well laugh about it.

But the book is also an uncharacteristically humble account of the author’s brush with near-death and how his hard-driving habits have nearly done him in time and again.

As Grizzard books go, this one probably rates a 6 or 7 on that overworked scale of one to 10. Higher, I suspect, for anyone who has undergone open-heart surgery. Which should make it a best seller, this being the Decade of the Open Heart when most of us know at least six people who have had ticker patch-up jobs.

Kent Ward is a free-lance writer who lives in Winterport.