Neal's Posts

As I get older time seems to move faster and faster. That is until the day I found out I would need surgery. From the initial shock and disbelief and then through all the frustrations of dealing with delay after delay time seemed to stop. It seemed as if my surgery date would never arrive. Well today is my one year anniversary of robotically assisted mitral valve repair and I am doing great! It seems like just yesterday. Now time seems to go by faster than ever.

Got home today after surgery. My mind year old daughter came home from school a little later. She gave me a timid hug and then placed her ear over my heart and gave me a thumbs up and announced "it goes bump bump like mine and does not go bump pallop anymore.

After going through a lot of follow up appointments and needing to get a little more fluid off the lungs I was wiped out. So we decided to stay in town one more day. By the time dinner rolled around I was feeling great so we walked over to a nearby restaurant. There was a lady and her husband just about to leave both with a pint of ice cream to go. I made some sort of polite conversation about the ice cream and she said she was splurging because she was having heart surgery tomorrow. Turns out that she was having a mitral valve repair also. That started a long conversation. She was thrilled to see how I looked 5 days post surgery. I don't know how many questions I answered. When she left she said she felt much less apprehensive of tomorrow. It felt great to encourage her when she needed it the most.