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The Widow Maker: A Heart Attack Survivor's Memoir of Stents, Pacemakers, Cardiac Rehab, and Learning to Live Again
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 17 2026
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.35 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
A Heart Attack Survivor's Memoir of Stents, Pacemakers, Cardiac Rehab, and Learning to Live Again
One minute, Frank Shumard was sitting in his cardiologist's office. The next, he was dying from the most feared heart attack in modern medicine: the Widowmaker.
What followed was not just a medical emergency, but the beginning of a long, often difficult, and surprisingly humorous journey through survival, recovery, fear, frustration, and eventually, gratitude.
In The Widowmaker, Shumard tells the true story of living through catastrophic cardiac events, emergency procedures, stents, pacemakers, cardiac rehab, sleepless nights, terrifying test results, and the strange reality of becoming a professional patient while still trying to remain a husband, father, traveler, writer, and stubbornly independent human being.
Written with warmth, honesty, and the sharp observational humor that has made Frank Shumard popular with readers around the world, this memoir does not read like a dry medical book. It reads like sitting across the table from someone who has truly been there - someone who understands the fear that arrives at 3 AM in a hospital room, the absurdity of hospital food, the exhaustion of recovery, and the emotional roller coaster faced by both patients and the people who love them.
But this is not simply a story about illness.
It is a story about survival.
About learning that life after serious heart disease is still life. About finding humor inside fear. About discovering that healing involves far more than scars, medications, and cardiac monitors. And about realizing that sometimes the most important victories happen long after the emergency is over.
For heart patients, caregivers, families, and anyone facing a frightening medical diagnosis, The Widowmaker offers honesty, encouragement, laughter, and the reassurance that even after the darkest moments, life can still be meaningful, funny, frustrating, beautiful, and very much worth living.
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