The Ministry of Happiness

Fearless means trusting your instincts and clarity of thought. Once you have made up your mind, don’t be scared of what if. ~ Rav Shastri

Happiness is Clarity

It’s been a long three weeks or so, and if you’re a regular reader you already know that. This is all tied to my multiple heart conditions and open heart surgery. I was diagnosed with two heart conditions about eight years ago. I have an aneurysm as well as an aortic valve issue, and as of last week found out that there is in fact a second aneurysm on my aortic arch. I have an annual assessment each October. This year I got some troubling results that showed my aortic valve had degraded since my last assessment. This seemed to indicate my surgery, which was always a when, not an if, was likely coming sooner than later. So I started to mentally prepare for that outcome. I met with my cardiologist and in fact it looked like surgery would be a year or two off, possibly even longer. I was feeling comfortable with that decision and my cardiologist recommended a CT scan to verify what we were seeing.

Unfortunately the CT didn’t verify what we were seeing but showed more issues. So then I was referred to a cardiac surgeon for a second opinion. Of course surgeons, like hammers have a specific function. To hammers, everything looks like a nail and surgeons want to do surgery. So once again I assumed surgery was likely back on. After meeting with my surgeon this week that in fact is the case. We’ve made the decision to do the surgery in August for a number of reasons, it’s a date I actually selected and one that the surgeon was comfortable with and made sense given all of the factors both medical and related to my life that we discussed.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say there is a certain amount of anxiety around the procedure. I’d be nuts not to be nervous about having my heart stopped for a couple of hours and then restarted. It also didn’t help that an hour after I made the decision someone told me that a mutual acquaintance had recently had open heart surgery and ended up in a coma, they’re fine now. It was really the wrong day for me to hear that. Within the last year I’ve also had an old friend die from complications of having this exact surgery, so yes, there is a fair amount of stress surrounding all of it.

But more than that there is clarity. I don’t work well with major uncertainty in my life, I’m a planner. Now that I have a decision and a generalized date I can plan around it and in fact have made most of the plans related to all of it. Certainty makes me happy, so this weekend had been a lazy easy weekend of watching football and eating good food. Decided to take a couple of days off and relax before I get back on schedule and start working toward my surgery date.

Have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane