Recently, I looked for the consolation a book might provide, a virtual community of fellow travelers, after being stunned to learn that I had a high calcium score that meant I was at “very high risk” of a heart attack. This after 74 years of being an avid swimmer, runner, xc-skier, hiker, you name it, almost never touching junk food and for the past decade, swearing off meat, cheese, butter and eggs. What?

Then, like when one hears a word for the “first time,” finds out what it means and then hears it constantly, since learning I had serious heart disease, it seems that everyone I encounter has their own bad heart story to tell.

The surfacing of fellow travelers in the most unlikely of bodies started one sweltering day this summer when a neighbor driving by, stopped to chat and I reminded her she should come for a swim any time in our pond.

“I can’t for a while. I just had a heart attack,” she said.

A heart attack! She was a backwoods woman, a hiker, an xc-skier, a gardener, a swimmer, a horseback rider, the last person in the world… What? She proceeded to tell the tale of sudden sweating, a tingling sensation in her arm, then being overtaken with nausea and being rushed to a hospital and getting a stent put in. Within a day, she drove several hundred miles home and here she was, running errands with her usual aplomb. (But she couldn’t swim for a couple of weeks because of a monitoring device on her arm that had to be kept dry.)

Then, two weeks later, she and her husband texted to say they were at the local hospital and couldn’t make supper with us. A couple of days later, she texted that she’d had a minor stroke. She was fine but learning to do what she needs to do to “stay healthier longer,” as she put it in her text.

As when one weeds a garden and each pass exposes another layer to be pulled, I realized the emergence of heart disease stories in previously unimaginable places had even earlier beginnings.

They actually began when, on a non-heart matter, I was at Dartmouth Health, the medical hub we Vermonters rely on for 10-alarm conditions, and stayed over with a childhood friend, a doc in a family of docs. Her younger sister, one of a passel of kids of an archetypal athletic, physically fit family, had heart disease as serious, or more so, than mine, my friend told me. No actual attack yet, but an equally shocking calcium score and some symptoms that compelled my friend on several occasions to wrangle with her sister in the wee hours to persuade her to get herself to an emergency room fast.

Then, last week, I made the long trek to a grange hall where the scant serious swing dancers in the surrounding counties gather periodically – a trek I finally made because of my sharpening awareness that life is finite. After spending the evening swinging to delicious 1920s classics, I glanced at a plate of scrumptious-looking cookies that one of the regulars, a very slim, athletic, seeming stoic New Englander-type had made.

“They look amazing, but I’m afraid I can’t,” I said.

“There are no eggs in them,” she said, encouraging.

“But butter?” I asked.

She conceded that yes, there was butter. Then, this friendly but definitely not heart-on-her sleeve woman said she’d had a heart attack the year before. Suddenly, we were chatting like old friends.

I’d always thought that heart attacks were a cut and dried matter – you had one and it was over. So, it was encouraging that people did live to tell the tale. Even in this state of long dirt roads and drives to far away hospitals.

It seems that we the afflicted, aging outdoor sports enthusiasts prominent among them, are everywhere in these hills, hidden behind (gradually peeling) veneers of good health, harboring heart attack stories.

Still, stoic as we may appear on the surface, if the local population is anything like the national norm, a fair number of us are suffering from anxiety about when and if a first, or second, attack will strike. Indeed, it turns out it is not uncommon for worry about having a second heart attack to rise to the level of PTSD. Harvard now has a mindfulness clinic for it.

I’m signing up for the local approximation.

N.B. There are a fair number of books about heart disease, but not as many as there are about cancer, and those there are tend to be by people in the medical profession, not, as in many instances with cancer,  by literary types.