“He kept saying to me, ‘I cannot stay here and you have to take care of my son.’”īrugada’s first impression was that Lech was perfectly healthy. The father was on the brink of a nervous breakdown, Brugada told me some years ago from the Cardiovascular Research and Teaching Institute in Aalst, Belgium, where he was then working. They suggested taking the boy to Brugada, who had developed a continent-wide reputation as an arrhythmia specialist.ĭesperate to save his son, Wockeczek snuck him out of the country. Doctors at his local hospital in Poland were unable to explain why she had died, and they were similarly stumped by Lech’s symptoms.

His 2-year-old daughter, Eva, had died several months before under similar circumstances. Wockeczek was tragically familiar with these attacks.

On several occasions, Wockeczek had performed chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth breathing to resuscitate him. The boy, Lech, had been experiencing frequent fainting attacks. Halfway around the world, similar inexplicable symptoms were encountered in 1986 by Pedro Brugada, a cardiac electrophysiologist in the Netherlands, when a Polish engineer named Andrea Wockeczek barged into his office carrying his 3-year-old son. Whatever the name, the syndrome was the same: sudden death of apparently healthy young men, often at night. “Such ‘deadly dreams’ are well known among the lay people,” a Philippine medical journal noted as far back as 1917, “many of whom view them with sullen respect, if not frank terror.” In Thailand, it was called lai-tai in Japan, pokkuri. In the Philippines, it was called bangungot, the Tagalog word for nightmare. This syndrome, it turns out, had bedeviled Southeast Asians for generations. In this installment, Sandeep Jauhar shares a story that didn’t make it into his latest book, “Heart: A History,” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts.

Deadly nightmare word