That Hole In My Heart

Margrét Ann Thors had a stroke that nearly killed her—but it led to love, and a very different kind of heartbreak and recovery. Her story was the winning entry in Glamour’s 11th annual essay contest.

You were born with a hole in your heart. We all were. And the miracle is, within minutes of your first breath, that hole closed, the wall between the right and left chambers sealed, and from then on your heart has been whole and complete.

Unless your heart is like mine. On Christmas morning of 2010, I was 22 years old and eating a gluten-free cracker when my cheeks and mouth began to melt and my lips went numb. “I feel really weird,” I whispered. The left side of my body went slack, and I dropped to the floor. Smack.

My mom, who had been brewing coffee and buttering cinnamon raisin toast, burned her hand on boiling water as she scrambled upstairs to get a sweater, and my dad carried me out to the car in his pajamas, in bare feet, in December in New England in a foot of snow. It was the kind of pristine, powdery, sugarplum morning people pray for and sing carols about—a white Christmas.

At a red light, I looked at myself in the side-view mirror and saw my lips pinned back and teeth bared. My left hand lay limp in my lap. I remember saying, “What if it’s something with my brain?” I remember looking down at my limp arm, my mind wrapping itself around a single thought: What if I can never hold a baby?

My mom put on her hazards and blew through six intersections.

Hours in the emergency room confirmed what we never would have expected: I’d had a stroke. A blood clot had shuttled from my heart to my head, and now there was a room in a wing of my brain with the power cut. I tried to picture it: this blood-deprived wet section of my mind. “I wouldn’t do that,” said the attending doctor. “I wouldn’t try to picture it if I were you.”