Matters of the Heart

Alright, I've been thinking about whether or not to blog about this, and I guess I'm going to go for it.

Some of you may know about this, and it may be a surprise to others (if anyone even reads this blog at all). This summer, July 13th to be exact, I will be having open heart surgery. Yep, real deal, cracked sternum, two-month-recovery heart surgery.

It all started about five years ago when I began working out and running on a regular basis. As I ran, I began noticing a numbness in my finger tips. If I kept going (which I usually did), the numbness would move up my arm and eventually lead to a sharp pain in my chest. I basically just wrote this off as weakness or a result of being out of shape. Looking back, this was a pretty stupid mentality. This went on for the next few years. Every time I would hike (which was actually what I was doing the very first time I felt the sensation), ride a bike, carry stuff up and down stairs or anything else that required much exertion, I would feel the numbness.

After Emily and I had been dating for a while, I told her about my situation. Being a nurse (and a clear-thinking human being), this didn't sit too well with her. I often made jokes with our friends about the "stick in my heart" and basically just laughed it off. She never laughed. After some time passed, we decided that it was time to get serious and get it checked out.

At the risk of writing a long, boring post, I'm going to leave it at that for now. I want to go in to more details about the actual problem, but Em isn't here and I can't remember the terminology. I'll be back soon with the details of the events that led up to us knowing that I need surgery.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to make all of this public. Maybe I could just use another place to vent my feelings, or maybe I want an easy forum to keep interested parties informed. Whatever the reason, if it leads you to pray, then please pray. If you have questions, feel free to ask (it's not really a touchy subject with Emily or me anymore as we have gotten pretty used to the fact that it's happening). If it inspires you to buy me Phish tickets for the fall tour to celebrate my recovery, then, by all means, feel free to do so. If it's a downer and you want to stop reading until its all over, well, I would certainly understand that, too. I'm sure I'll be writing about road trips and wearing my brother-in-laws underwear to Reds games again in no time.