An Affair of the Heart

It's 02/08/13

Wow, what a journey the past couple of months have been.  I want to share some things that I've been thinking.  As a pastor it's easy to get caught up in everyone else's situations and neglect your own self and that's exactly what happened to me.

On December 24, 2012 I was helping load the truck with music and sound equipment and my chest started tightening up.  Thinking that this was acid reflux symptoms I kept on going.  My chest tightened up again and for the next month I kept having these acid reflux like symptoms.  At Missy's urging I went to our family physician and he did a routine EKG and even said he was 95% sure it was acid reflux.  However, the EKG showed an anomaly.  This prompted a visit to the Heart specialist and he ordered up a nuclear stress test.  That showed some signs that something wasn't right with my heart.  They signed me up for a left heart catheterization.  This test is to check and see if there are any blockages in the arteries of the heart.  The cool thing is if they find something normally they can go in and put a stint in to open up the artery.  I came out of the surgery with the doctor looking concerned.  He said, that I needed a quadruple bypass surgery.  One artery was completely blocked.  Another was 95% Another was 80% and the final one was 75% blocked.  From a simple EKG abnormality to Quadruple by pass surgery.  Surreal.

The surgery was scheduled for the next day.  I didn't even have time to think about it which was probably a good thing.  The family came in and Missy's eyes were red from crying.  Maggie was quietly confident and saying that God has got this.  Justin on the other hand just fell on my feet and started sobbing.  I couldn't hold it in.  I lost it.  All of a sudden realized my mortality.  There are so many things running through my mind.  They say open heart surgery is routine. They do thousands of these things, but I say, it's routine unless you are the one that's getting the surgery!

The doctors and nurses were amazing and my anesthesiologist (one nurse called her the cocktail waitress) did such a great job.  I remember my ride to surgery and then the next thing I know is that they are taking the airway out without any problems and the surgery was done in just 4 /12 hours.  

I feel like I have a new lease on life.  Everyday is a blessing    For my next few blog entries  I want to explore some things that God has shown me through this process.  I realize that God has a purpose for my life and I know he has purpose for yours.  Hopefully you won't have to go through a life threatening situation to realize this, but everything came into focus when this happened to me.