My Heart Attack Was a Reboot

My Heart Attack Was a Reboot

We were in the air somewhere between New Orleans and Baltimore.

I had a stomachache. Nothing dramatic. I got up to go to the bathroom and felt lightheaded in the aisle. Not panic. Not fear. Just off.

Then I went down.

Someone helped me back to my seat. I wasn’t embarrassed. I wasn’t alarmed. I assumed I’d passed out. People pass out sometimes. That explanation satisfied me completely.

When we landed, it stopped being my decision. They had me sit down. They checked me. Someone put me in a wheelchair. I still didn’t feel like anything was seriously wrong.

Then a man handed me aspirin and started moving fast.

Somewhere between the gate and the doors I realized I was being wheeled into an ambulance. Baltimore airport. Nearest ER: fourteen minutes away.

That’s when he told me my blood pressure.

Thirty over sixty.

Too low to give me anything. No drugs. No intervention. Just transport. Just time.

For fourteen minutes I stayed conscious by effort. Not heroically. Practically. The way you do when you’re holding something heavy and you know that if you let go, you’re done. I remember thinking one thing: stay here.

As we pulled into the hospital, I didn’t.

I died.

No tunnel. No light. No revelation. I saw myself going out the way a system shuts down—clean, mechanical. Then nothing.

A moment later, they hit me with the paddles.

I came back.

What surprised me wasn’t fear or relief. It was clarity. Like a system rebooting with fewer background processes running. The noise dropped out. The story dropped out.

And the realization that landed was simple:

You make your own reality.

Not in the motivational sense. Structure. The reality you live in is built out of what you normalize—what you tolerate, what you compensate for, what you quietly accept as “just how things are.” Like you actually get to choose how, what, with whom, and where you spend your time and energy.

I have been physically off balance my entire life.

I was born with failure to thrive. I had a drop foot. I lost a kidney. By the time I was two, my body had already been cut into and altered. Later, one leg grew significantly longer than the other. As a teenager, surgeons deliberately slowed the growth of the longer leg so I wouldn’t end up completely uneven. It helped. It didn’t fix it. I still have about a five-centimeter difference.

Living like that teaches you to compensate constantly. Pain becomes background noise. Effort becomes normal.

Eventually, I realized I had extended that logic everywhere else.

I stayed too long in dysfunctional organizations. I tolerated bad behavior from people because the work mattered. I absorbed stress and told myself it was the price of doing something meaningful. I confused endurance with integrity.

My body kept track.

I did triathlons. I played squash obsessively. I trained in MMA. I proved to myself I wasn’t fragile. That mattered. But resilience without alignment has a shelf life. I did these things to prove I could do them. I should have done more regularly and reliably. It might not have mattered.

There was another layer to this, and it took longer to see because it looked like virtue.

OCD doesn’t just make you check or count. At its core, it trains you to believe that you are responsible for preventing harm. That if something goes wrong, it will be because you failed to manage it correctly.

If you’re also someone deeply committed to treating people the right way—fairness, loyalty, not abusing power—that wiring can be dangerous. It makes you unusually tolerant of narcissistic and dysfunctional behavior. You explain it. You absorb it. You tell yourself staying calm and decent is the moral choice.

Especially when the work matters.

A few months before my heart attack, I had a blowup with a co-founder.

He had been treating me terribly for years. This wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t occasional. It was a pattern. This time, I yelled. Not theatrically. From somewhere overfull.

And I felt something in my chest shift.

Not pain. Pressure. Like a system spiking past tolerance. I could feel my blood pressure go off the rails in real time. I noticed it. I clocked it. And then I did what I’d always done.

I kept going.

A few months later, my heart stopped on a plane.

Stress isn’t abstract. It’s cumulative. It waits patiently while you explain things away.

That argument didn’t feel dramatic afterward. I didn’t quit. I didn’t draw boundaries. I moved on.

My body didn’t.

There is nothing noble about letting someone repeatedly treat you like shit because you care about doing the right thing. That isn’t morality. It’s misalignment. And for someone wired like me, it’s dangerous.

The heart attack didn’t come out of nowhere. It came at the end of a long pattern of tolerating what should have been refused.

When I came back, that belief was gone.

Not softened. Gone.

I didn’t become less ethical. I became less vulnerable for abuse. I stopped confusing kindness with self-erasure. I stopped believing that staying in toxic dynamics was a prerequisite for building meaningful things.

Balance isn’t something you inherit. It’s something you construct deliberately. And if you don’t, your body will eventually intervene.

I’m still uneven. That hasn’t changed. But I’m far more careful now about what—and who—I allow to shape my internal terrain.

Most people don’t survive past five years with a heart attack.

I’m on my sixth because I took radical steps to change my attitude and being.

You don’t get infinite resets.

I was given one.

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Note

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