By Nancy Szokan
The Washington Post
Lynne Cox always loved to be in the water.
Early in life, she developed an affinity for long-distance, open-water swimming. She broke several records swimming the English Channel, and she was the first person to swim the Strait of Magellan in Chile and to swim around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. And she excelled at swimming in cold water.
Her extraordinary tolerance for cold fascinated scientists, and she participated in studies at several universities in the United States and abroad.
Cox’s life changed dramatically. She was exhausted, her feet were swollen; her heart started racing. She had trouble breathing and got severe hand cramps.
Doctors told her that she suffered from atrial fibrillation and that her EJ — ejection fraction, the amount of blood her heart pumped with every beat — was frighteningly low. She’d gone from being a superathlete to almost an invalid, and the doctors warned her that she was facing a future that might include a defibrillator, a pacemaker, a heart transplant — and possibly early death.
Well, that’s not quite how it turned out. In her new memoir, “Swimming in the Sink: An Episode of the Heart,” Cox recounts her physical and emotional journey back toward health. It’s not the best-written memoir around, but it’s a pretty impressive tale — and includes fascinating side stories.
And the title? It comes from the way Cox began getting ready to face the ocean again — filling the sink with cold water and ice cubes, and moving her hands through the water, twisting her head and breathing with the rhythm of her strokes. “I laughed at myself,” she writes. “I once swam the English Channel, and now I am swimming in the sink.”
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