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Lisa Billteen was the first girl to break my heart.

In the late 1970s, Lisa and her family lived down the alley from my family in Butte’s Centerville neighborhood. It is what they used to call “Corktown,” but we never heard of that in those days.

A pretty girl with long blond hair, Lisa was my first best friend. From what I remember, we played together just about every day. Her brother Tom, who is now the drummer/eye candy for the Butte heartthrob cover band “High Ore Road,” was my older brother’s best friend.

Often, it was the four of us playing. Other times it was just Lisa and me. Our family photo album still includes photos of the four of us together.

I remember when we would pretend that we were in a band, singing Elvis Presley songs. I remember when we covered ourselves in bed sheets and ran around the yard pretending that we were ghosts.

I used to run down the alley to her house at least 10 times a day. That probably doubled on the days when Lisa wasn’t home. I just had to go and check to see if she was back yet.

Lisa was a year ahead of me in school — before I had to repeat the third grade — and I think her family moved out of the neighborhood about the time I was starting kindergarten. So, I was around 5 when she moved.

That move was devastating. It was also back when people moved out of your lives when they left the neighborhood. There was no Facebook or Snapchat to help us keep in touch. If we could not walk or ride a bike to each other’s house, then we just did not see each other.

When the Billteen family moved all the way to the bottom of the hill, they might as well have moved across the ocean. We never saw them, but I thought about Lisa all the time.

When I thought about the friend I lost, it made me sad. It still does.

Lisa was never a part of my life again. She went to Butte High when I was at Butte Central, and I had no idea where she went after high school. I did not know where she was living or what she did for work. I really did not know anything about her at all.

She just disappeared.

That heartbreak, though, is not the reason I was in St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula last week for a procedure on my heart. I was there for an ablation to try to end my string of atrial fibrillation episodes. AFib, as they call it for short, has been something I have been dealing with for years.

For the last 15 to 20 years, I would often feel my heart start beating faster for a split second. But then it would stop before I had time to put my hand up to feel it. I knew something was probably wrong, but I kept telling myself it was nothing.

After all, I was an avid runner, and my resting heart rate was usually 60 beats per minute or below when this started. I figured my heart was better than most.

Then one Wednesday night in September of 2020, I sat down on my recliner after taking part in the KBOW sports radio show “Overtime” at the Metals Sports Bar & Grill.

Suddenly, like someone pulled the cord on a lawnmower, my heart took off. It was nearly bouncing out of my chest. It was beating at nearly 180 beats per minute, but at a very erratic pace.

It would be like 180. Then 55. Then 130. Then 85.

At first, my wife and I laughed about it as we pulled out our phones to Google what the heck could be going on. But when I started to feel like I was going to pass out, my wife called 911. I laid back on the recliner with my head below my feet and waited for the ambulance to come.

I told my wife and kids that I love them, thinking it might be my last chance to say it.

Firefighter and paramedic Matt Pokorny, one of the best high school basketball players I ever watched play, rushed through my door and started checking my vitals.

“You look terrible,” he said.

After a minute, though, he told me it was probably just an AFib episode. I was not going to die.

After a few hours at the emergency room at St. James Hospital, my heart was zapped back into rhythm with a defibrillator.

The next month featured a ton of tests. I wore a heart monitor for a few days, and I had to take a stress text on a treadmill. Eventually, a local cardiologist said that the incident would probably never happen again. If it did, he said, it likely would not be for at least six years.

He was off by two years.

I would still feel the heart about to take off sometimes, more and more all the time. But it did not jump out of rhythm again until last October. Then it did it again this past Mother’s Day, and my wife sat by my side for 4 hours in the ER on her special day.

That led to more tests, and I eventually found myself at St. Pat’s last week to hopefully put the issue to bed. Dr. Melissa Robinson inserted a catheter into my groin and guided it up my veins to my heart. Then, she zapped the abnormal heart tissue so it can no longer send out the faulty signals.

Or something like that.

I am told Dr. Robinson is like the Michael Jordan of this procedure. She travels around the country to teach other cardiologists how it is done.

An ablation is a minimally evasive procedure, and I should be back on my mountain bike later this week or next. Hopefully, I will never have another heart issue again, and I can already feel that my heart beat is better.

The staff at St. Pat’s is also incredible. It is full of friendly professionals who are the best at what they do. As they prepped me for the procedure over a couple of hours, I must have been introduced to 20 different people.

Of course, many of them talked about Butte’s alleged dirty water. When you’re from Butte, people always want to talk about your hometown when you go to other cities in Montana.

One nurse talked about the time one of her coworkers from Butte took her to the Mining City. It was almost as if she was talking about visiting Kiev and somehow surviving. She stayed at the Finlen Hotel and watched her friend’s brother play in a band at the Party Palace.

“What’s her brother’s name?” I asked. “I’m sure I know him.”

“Oh, I’ll have to ask her,” she said. “She is here today.”

Not only was she in the hospital, she was part of the team to work the procedure. Among other things, she was going to help put on the nearly 50 stickers on my chest and back to hook me up to the machines to monitor my heart.

A handful of more people came in, introduced themselves and told me what they were doing before that nurse came back with her nurse friend from Butte.

“This is the Butte girl I told you about,” she said.

I was not wearing my contacts or my glasses, so I could not make out the face of the woman peaking her head around the curtain. Plus, she was wearing a hat for surgery and some glasses. Her blond hair is no longer long.

“What’s your brother’s name?” the other nurse asked her.

“Tom Billteen,” she said.

I tried to squint my eyes to make her face come into focus. My heart skipped as I rhetorically asked, “Lisa?”

The full-circle moment almost felt like a dream.

Some 45 years after Lisa Billteen broke my heart by moving away, she was part of the great team that fixed it.

 — Bill Foley, whose heart has also been repeatedly broken by the Chicago Bears, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.