Published: August 24, 2009 12:02 am         

The Off Season: The size of a heart does matter

We had a medical emergency at our house a few weeks back, but fortunately, after a little first-aid, an all-night nursing vigil, and a trip into town, we’re feeling a little bit better about things now.

Oh, the injured patient weighed 4 ounces and was about 3-1/2 inches long.

I had been mowing much of the day, an uncharacteristically cool and breezy one for so late in July in Indiana. As is most often the routine, I was following the mowing I do — both riding and pushing — by walking around my yard, weed trimmer in hand, snipping off the last defiant weeds and blades of grass that dare grow around the base of my pines or along our flower beds.

As I worked my way south along the road that runs with my property, I heard the victim before I ever saw her despite the ear plugs I wear for such jobs. She was a ruby-throated hummingbird, undoubtedly struck by a passing car, and she lay in the road, buzzing herself in desperate semi-circles as she tried to get a wing to work that obviously no longer was capable.

I bent down and scooped her up, and with the weed whacker in one hand, I held her in my palm, her heart thumping away so hard that the giant who now held her could feel it.

My wife, working at the kitchen sink, saw me walking toward the door, my hand cupped oddly against my stomach, looking down as if I’d cut myself, broken a bone, perhaps suffered a stroke. She knew that it had nearly become tradition for the two of us to make a fast trip to the doctor each summer so he could suture a gash, check a sprain, or deliver an injection to soothe hornet stings. She met me at the door wringing the dish towel in her hands.

When I opened my hand, it was as if my wife’s heart opened, too, for she took the bird into her hands and immediately began to fret about what we were to do.

Hummingbirds have a resting heart rate of about 250 beats a minute, but their in-flight rate soars to more than 1,200; our injured friend’s pulse was much closer to the latter figure, and it was apparent that she needed to eat and cool off as well. Hummers have to consume their own body weight in nectar or sugar every day, and I had no idea how long she had been flipping herself over in the road.

I took her to one of our feeders and sat her on a white, plastic perch in the hope that she would guzzle a little sugar water. She sat on the perch, tottering and unsteady as if drunk, but she couldn’t make herself drink. We literally shoved her nail-like nose into one of the feeder’s red flower-shaped watering holes, but not once did we see the tiny switchblade of her tongue lap up any of the life-giving sugar.

I was convinced that she would die, and that we would be wise to take her to the wood line and leave her there. I felt her broken wing, bent upward like a wind-ravaged screen door, would be her end. Joanie thought otherwise.

I have written before of a time when we nursed a hummingbird back to health; it had crashed into our picture window and knocked itself silly on the concrete walk by our front door. I must have sat for two hours with that bird, an eye-dropper of liquid ambrosia in hand, reviving her in a way that I didn’t feel our hit-and-run bird could be.

My wife promptly brought her inside, old wives’ tales be hanged. She rolled up an old towel, placed it in the bottom of a small cardboard box, then started feeding our new friend with that same eye dropper as the bird sat on the towel in the semi-darkness. Within an hour, she was bright-eyed and slugging down sugar water every 15 minutes, but she made no attempt to fly out of the open box.

That night, while I snored in imitation of that noisy weed trimmer of mine, my wife rose from her bed at virtually every hour on the clock to feed our injured friend. The next day, my bleary-eyed mate and I drove the bird into town to leave her for a lady who deals with injured wild animals. We didn’t know that savior’s name, but found out about her from a friend of a friend, or perhaps that friend’s cousin. Joanie had prepared a bottle of our homemade bird brew, and she even handed over our eye dropper; we’ll have to replace that soon for what could be next season’s dramas.

We have purposely tried to not find out the fate our little friend; we might not have wanted to know. But I do know that it is said that a hummingbird’s heart comprises about 2.5 percent of its total body weight, while a human heart, at a little under 11 ounces, is less than 0.5 percent of ours.

For some people, however, like my wife, for instance, I think it is much, much bigger.

Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com or by mail c/o the Tribune-Star at P.O. Box. 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. His second book, "Sidelines: The Best of the Basketball Stories…" is to be released this fall. Mike’s Web site is mikelunsford.com.