Because You Asked

Since my near death experience in March, I have shared with you a few of the recovery steps/roadblocks that have happened since. Nearly every day I am asked how are you doing and I appreciate the concern from most of you. I find it a little ghoulish that some of you have started a bracket to pick the day and time of my demise and that you started it at a watch party for my dying.

I'm mostly pissed that I wasn't invited to participate.

After drawing enough blood to start another person, and a handful of Echocardiograms, along with enough CT scans to make me glow at night in the dark, the results are in from both my Cardiologist and GP. I am still going to die. Eventually. Death remains undefeated but I should be able to stave it off for another decade at least. Medically. Doing something stupid can't be forecasted by the medical profession, although they are all in agreement that I am more inclined to do something than not do something stupid.

I was frustrated by my Cardiologist team. It took them three tries to finally figure out why I was't recovering as well, and fast, as they, and I, expected. They finally determined that I was still leaking fluid around my heart and put me on Lasik to draw it out and allow me to breathe again. This did the trick even if it meant that I was going to the bathroom every twenty minutes for the first week until my body adapted to the drug.

Initially they had me scheduled to go to cardiac rehab about two weeks after the surgery but then they suddenly called and told me they didn't want me going for at least three months. When I asked why they were very evasive and just kind of said that they would wait to see how I was progressing. I believe they were afraid to send me for fear of finally finishing the job of killing me they messed up during surgery and were more afraid of a lawsuit from Linda then they were of me dying without rehab.

I continued to feel only 50% better after five weeks. I was still out of breath bending over and I was very dizzy anytime I moved my head, awake or asleep. I had no energy and found myself mostly laying around the house doing nothing and sleeping on and off all day long.

I thought that maybe doing Tai Chi or Yoga would help but after looking into both I realized I was never going to give it all my effort so I put those aside. I also vowed to be a better human by being less angry and frustrated, two major factors in heart disease. I am trying to be better but my gene pool keeps fighting against my efforts.

What I did decide to do was to start walking and resuming doing work around the house that was physically stressful. I was tired of babying myself and decided that if I die I die but I was not going to live in a cocoon for the rest of my life.

In the three weeks since I pulled the trigger on this I can feel my stamina getting better and I just feel better overall. I have lost fifteen pounds since the surgery and while my goal is to get down to my birth weight, I'll settle for another ten pounds. I would say that I feel 95% of my old self.

My cardiologist had me stop two and a half of the drugs I was on and that has made my dizziness be reduced by 99%. We found out that my surgeon had me on a blood thinner but didn't tell my cardiologist who put me on a different one and for two and a half months I've been on both. Eliminating one has helped and instead of being on four high blood pressure meds, I'm back to the two I have been on for years. I'm down from sixteen pills a day to a still insane, but better, twelve a day. I'm told that after a year I'll be able to stop three of them so things will be moving in the right direction on this.

All my tests are positive. My PSA was 0.630 which is excellent. My BNP, while still high has gone down from 434 before my stent surgery, to 192 just afterwards, to 163 last week. The trend is in the right direction. The CT scan they did on my abdomen and chest was mostly excellent although they did discover, what they refer to as a "mild" case of emphysema. That is medical talk for nothing to worry about because it affects you and not me.

All the other organs are working as they should and as long as I take my drugs and do what the doctors tell me to do my heart should be just fine too. I still have borderline diabetes but the drugs I'm on for that is keeping my A1C in the 6.9 - 7.1 range so I can live with that.

Sorry to bore you with all the gory details of my medical condition but honestly I get asked these questions weekly from many of you and I wanted you all to know that I was well on the road to recovery. I'm not going to be 32 again but if I can be a healthy 72 that will work. If anything changes I promise I will let everyone know.

For those that had June for my demise, you lose. Sorry.