In mid-August, while meeting with my accountant, I started to feel some slight pressure on my chest. Since we were at a Culvers, I made some jokes about breathing in the fat directly into my arteries. I got to the parking lot, into my car and figured I would call my doctor to see if I could get in to see him.
He was not there until Monday and they advised me to go to the urgent care down the road, which I did. They then advised me to go to the adjoining ER and they more than advised me to go to the hospital to get a stent put into one of my arteries. Three days in the hospital later, I was advised to follow up with an out-patient procedure to finish routing out some arteries.
So I show up two weeks later and mid-procedure, found myself in the hospital again, this time being prepped for some open-heart surgery. I am writing this and you are reading this, so everything went fine and I’m recovering nicely.
But I spent a lot of time staring out a hospital window, thinking about all sorts of things. I walk 5-6 miles a day; don’t drink, smoke or eat fast food (I know, Culvers, but it was only because they had tables and it was halfway between me and my accountant. I had a tea) and my cardiologist said it was just the luck of my genes. The rest of my arteries was clean and very viable. A heart episode and surgery was the last thing I was planning on, yet here I was, one bad decision to go home instead of to the urgent care away from not being here.
While I was in the hospital, my 85-year old neighbor turned 86 and celebrated his 60th wedding anniversary. He called me just before I went into surgery, asking where I was since he had not seen me pass his house on my walks in a while. My daughter returned the call, saying I’d stop by to say hi when I got home. I got home on a Wednesday afternoon, went walking to his house to say hi on Thursday morning. He had a headache and had gone to lie down, but he came out to say hi.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, tell you all about it,” I waved. “Get some sleep.”
Later that evening, his neighbor across the street called me and woke me up. “Did I hear the ambulance? He was CareFlighted to the hospital… aneurysm, in a coma,” she said.
He never woke up. They took him off life support that next week while his favorite singer, Roger Whitaker, was playing in the background.
It got me thinking about traveling music. Two years ago, my sister-in-law asked me to play Always on my Mind by Elvis Presley for her traveling music. It was one of the random thoughts I had while staring out the window of my hospital room. I still don’t have a song I would like to travel to.
I hate to leave these things to chance where my family opens the Music app on your iPhone and selects some songs they think were my favorites. My music is a mess; it’s all over the place from Taylor Swift to Janis Ian to Joplin to Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Amy MacDonald to Billie Eilish to Hank Williams to Frank Sinatra… well, you know if you’ve been following me here a while. My musical taste is pretty much all over the map.
I guess maybe a traveling playlist should be part of my final papers. Maybe there is an app for that, or at least a playlist.
