re: Health or money?

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Two years ago this July I felt like I was getting sick, chest cold type sick. Couple weeks go by andcit isn’t getting better. Go to the doctor and they say I have asthma. Doesn’t make sense that I’d develop asthma in my mid-40s. But whatever. They give me an inhaler and steroids. Couple weeks go by and it’s no better. In fact, getting worse. I go back to the dr and they say I have pneumonia. They give me more steroids and antibiotics. I go about two more months fighting what I thought was pneumonia. During this time it’s getting harder and harder to breath. On top of that I’m starting to swell, mainly in my ankles and lower legs. I talk to a guy at work who tells me it sounds like heart failure to him. So I dump my hometown docotor and go to a cardiologist. They diagnosed me with stage IV congestive heart failure and put me in the hospital. They do tests and discover I had a heart defect, a “cleft” mitral valve. I’d been born with it, lived with it my whole life and had no idea. It had progressed to the point my heart could not pump blood. By the time they put me in the hospital all my major organs had already shut down. I’d even stopped digesting food. I was by the Docotor’s estimate about 24-48 hours from dying if I’d not got help when I did. They say I need open heart surgery to replace my mitral valve with a mechanical valve. They did not tell me until later that they gave me about a 10% chance of surviving the surgery. So on Nov 14, 2016 they do the surgery. I begin recovering rather well. One week later I’m still in CICU at Grandview Hospital and I’m schedueld to go home the next day. But something goes wrong. I start bleeding from the sutures in my heart. They had overdosed me with Coumadin (blood thinner). I basically bleed to death internally. About 9:00 PM that night I coded. They revivedcme and rushed me to the ER. My wife even watched it happen. Shook her up. The dr just initially told my wife I’d suffered a “catastrophic event” and he would do what he could but was not optimistic. They opened my chest back up, stopped the bleeding and gave me blood transfusions. What had stopped my heart was all the blood leaking from my heart had filled the membrane that surrounds my heart until my heart could not pump any longer. After that I spent another two weeks in the hospital and two months recovering at home. I’m back on my feet though and living an almost normal life. At my last check up they tested my heart function and it’s almost that of a normal healthy adult.

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If you weren't right with the Big Man upstairs before, I hope you take advantage of this opportunity now.

You are blessed!

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Both. Keep it in a jar on my mantle

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