The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Heart troubles: Fact-checking in the cardiac ICU, post-bypass

Car­diac wor­ries arise in sev­eral places in The Solomon Scan­dals. My father’s heart attack was one of the defin­ing moments of his life and even mine. Scan­dals is fic­tion, not a mem­oir. But his attack took place in his early 40s when he was about to show us a movie, just as reporter Jon Stone’s father does in Scan­dals.

Heart dis­ease is also a metaphor that Margo, Stone’s girl­friend, uses when dis­cussing Vulture’s Point, Solomon’s rick­ety office build­ing hous­ing IRS and CIA workers.

The issue at hand is whether any­one can pre­dict if or when Vulture’s Point will fall down. “Oh, maybe a decade or so, with tip-offs,” Margo says. “Like if the ele­va­tors stopped work­ing, or the win­dows won’t open. It’s like heart prob­lems, nor­mally. You get sick before you kick the bucket. I mean, the cracks still aren’t that large.”

A skep­ti­cal Stone responds with word of his friend the marathon run­ner who, minus the least warn­ing, died at 25 of a mas­sive coro­nary. “Just what was ‘nor­mally’?” Stone thinks.

In real life, only a month or so after I wrote the above dia­logue, some­one suf­fered a heart attack, then had his chest cracked open for a quad bypass. Me. I have a mes­sage. Don’t trust tread­mill stress tests alone. Get the full trim­mings: an MRI or what­ever. I was a false neg­a­tive. All of my valves were well-clogged, and at least one doc­tor says that con­fused the test­ing giz­mos. So much for the virtues of consistency.

I did some of the fact-checking for the cardiac-related scenes while in the car­diac ICU at Inova Alexan­dria Hos­pi­tal (photo) fol­low­ing my quad.

Except for an occa­sional lit­tle cough, a tem­po­rary com­pli­ca­tion from the oper­a­tion, I’m com­ing along fine now, and on car­diac mat­ters, I’m more con­fi­dent than ever that Scan­dals is authentic.

• Overview of ‘The Solomon Scandals’
• From Bob Dylan to D.C.’s white-collar crooks: U.K. music site’s 3,000-word Q&A with David Rothman
• Plot
• The Solomon Scandals: A BRIEF video introduction
• The IRS as fodder for David Foster Wallace and me