I did not set out to write a book. I set out not to die.
When I left the hospital in January 2021 — against medical advice, with a one hundred percent blocked left anterior descending artery and the words “if you live that long” still in my ears — I had no larger ambition than finding out whether my body could do something the standard algorithm said it couldn’t. That was the whole project. Stay alive long enough to find out.
What followed was five years of daily treatment, meticulous self-observation, obsessive reading, and a gradual, then undeniable, transformation. My treadmill speeds improved. My thinking sharpened. Capacities I had quietly written off came back. And when my wife Jennifer — who had navigated traumatic brain injury, scleroderma, and lymphoma across two decades — began using the same machine at a fraction of my intensity and experienced her own quiet, measurable improvements, I stopped thinking of this as a personal discovery and started thinking of it as something other people deserved to know about.
The therapy is called Enhanced External Counterpulsation. EECP. It is FDA-cleared. Medicare covers it. The clinical literature supporting it stretches back decades and runs to hundreds of peer-reviewed studies. More than a thousand centers in China alone offer it as standard cardiovascular care. And the overwhelming majority of American patients with heart disease — the people who need it most — have never heard of it.
EECP does not generate implant revenue. It cannot be billed in fifteen minutes. It asks the body to build its own solutions rather than deferring to a procedure. In a system organized around procedural throughput, those qualities make it inconvenient rather than compelling, regardless of the clinical merits.
I am not a physician. I am a patient who read everything he could find and then lived the results. This book makes no claim to be a medical textbook. What it tries to be is the resource I did not have when I needed it most: a clear, honest account of what EECP is, what the evidence shows, who it is likely to help, and why you have probably never been told about it.
I wrote it for the person sitting in a hospital bed with a phone and a weekend, the way I once was. For the caregiver reading at two in the morning. For the patient who has been told they have exhausted their options and has not yet learned that options sometimes exist outside the standard algorithm.
I wrote it for my mother, who never got the chance to try a different path.
And I wrote it because I am running faster at fifty-two than I did at forty, with a blocked widow maker and no bypass, and that fact deserves an explanation that more people should have access to.