Rumors of my Demise

Some of you may have heard I had a heart attack. That is true, in the same sense that the ocean is a bit damp.

I should not be here to write this.

Thursday night I woke up with chest pains. Guys - LISTEN TO YOUR BODIES. I thought about lying down and hoping it would pass. Instead, I woke up Shari and told her, “I think you need to take me to the ER.”

She told the girls, I got dressed, we got in the car. Twenty minutes later I walked into the ER at Saint Margaret’s and told them I was having a heart attack.

I’m not sure of the timeline from there. I arrested in the ER multiple times. Shari said fifteen people materialized out of thin air and calmly started working to tell my heart to shut up, sit down, and stop trying to kill me.

It took a while.

I don’t recall anything after that. (Shari does, which makes my heart hurt in entirely different ways.) My heart stopped and was restarted eleven times: in the ER, on the life flight to Presby, and even in the cath lab while they were working to get a stent in to, you know, keep me from not dying.

For those wondering: yes, it was a widowmaker - a Left Anterior Descending ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction (LAD STEMI) to be exact. If the timing for everything had not been just right; if someone had given up after that tenth shock; if the ER and ICU teams hadn’t been as dedicated and skilled, I wouldn’t be here. The fact that I am simply alive is a miracle in and of itself.

The fact that I apparently have no mental impairment (or at least, no more than I started with) is an entirely separate miracle in and of itself.

The fact that I am up and moving (three laps on the floor this morning!) without intensive cardio rehab is yet another.

I am thanking God continually for his provision. As John M. Olsen commented elsewhere, “There are no guarantees in life, but I see a lot of tender mercies.” I am going to wake up every day giving thanks for the precious gift of another twenty-four hours with Shari and the girls. I am going to work hard to ensure I come back from this as best I can, and that they will all have to put up with me for a long, long time to come.

Now that I’m home, I have a whole new set of challenges over the next few weeks. I have half a dozen follow-up appointments, a big chunk of new meds to learn how to manage, dietary restrictions to make myself aware of, and other such things.

In my mind, the most important of all of these is cardiac rehab. From what I understand at this point, parts of my heart are essentially deciding whether to stick around or die and become scar tissue. The harder I work my heart (under adult medical supervision!), the more functionality I’ll save.

And believe me, I want to save that stupid, refurbished heart. It’s what’s keeping me around and letting me enjoy life. God willing, I’ve got a couple of decades ahead of me now. I may not tackle it with the same… intensity… that I have in the past few years, but as Lennier said in Babylon Five:

There is so much more to say. Shari & I are floored by the support we have gotten over the past few days from friends, family, and the folks at Microsoft and Raconteur Press. You all are amazing. My life is going to be changing over the months and years to come, but at least I have a life to change now. That’s no small thing.