With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why. ~ David Byrne

Rev Kane’s Wild Ride: The Little Victories

It was a hectic day in my recovery world today. I had seven different visitors which is absolutely a new record for me. During the day I posted a comment about wearing my first non-button up shirt and they replied I guess it’s the little victories, and it absolutely is about the little victories. As with all big challenges whether it’s hiking the Appalachian Trail or recovering from open heart surgery it’s always the mental aspects that catch you off guard and make things hard. So in terms of recovering from heart surgery, each of these little victories helps you see that things will get better and that there is healing at the end of this road. So tonight I just want to celebrate some of these over the last week.

First and foremost, my community of support has been absolutely amazing. Thank you to all of you. Today the person who picked me up for my cardiologist appointment brought their 20 year-old son. A really wonderful young man, as we neared the end of the return trip he said to me, “wow, now I get all the hype, you’re a cool dude.” I’ll take that from any 20 year-old as a 60 year-old grouch.

There are no stitches or staples from my surgery, I’m held together by super glue. So the glue has to be scrubbed and picked off, sort of like when you peel skin after a sunburn. Made some great progress on that today and it’s really, fucking weird. In case you didn’t know, super glue was actually used during the Vietnam War for exactly this reason, here’s a link to the history of super glue.

While I thought things had proceeded in average fashion, my cardiologist told me today that I got out of the hospital faster than any patient she’s had who had this process. I was really proud of that, I worked hard to be ready for this process.

Tonight, I did the longest walk of my recovery so far. Not really that far, but as that distance increases I get happier.

Today I decided to really cook. I make my own meals every night, but with all of the gifted vegetables starting to age and diminish and having seen an African Pepper Sauce recipe while I was in the hospital, I made an African bean stew tonight. After I had already said I didn’t need anything else it hit me that I really wanted some good bread with this dish, my last visitor of the day walked in with a really good loaf of sourdough bread, serendipity!

I’ve also been working very hard to express my gratitude to people, so today, I sent out some thank yous, texts and made a few calls just to say thanks. And thank you all for being here and following along.

Small positive steps is the way! This is know. ~ Rev Kane