If it takes heart surgery to finally get me to begin writing, then so be it.  Lord knows I have a multitude of journeys to chronicle, but for now this “breaking news” is my only focus. 

In March, I was diagnosed with severe aortic stenosis after spending most of a weekend in Seattle Northwest Hospital undergoing a battery of tests.  The cardiac team zeroed in on my calcified heart valve within hours of admission to the ER. They detected a telltale murmur that’s a possible sign of restrictions in blood flow from the valve’s “leaflets” into the aorta which is how blood cycles back into your body. So yah, I have sticky valve flaps (shown below).

Two CT scans, an electrocardiogram, and an echocardiogram confirmed the severity of the calcification and prompted a rapid succession of consults with the cardiology specialists about surgery. The options are starkly different:  thread a new valve up through my arteries to place it next to the faulty one or crack open my chest and replace the bad boy with a bioprosthetic (tissue) valve. 

The first approach, called TAVR, takes an hour and allows you to go home the next day. On the other hand, open heart surgery is a six-hour procedure requiring a weeklong hospitalization and up to two months of recovery. 

I chose the latter. Whelp!

Going into 2025, my main health concern was maintaining sanity over the opening act of Trump II: The Revenge Tour.

Pivoting to heart surgery this week down the street at UW Montlake is a gut-wrenching plot twist, to be honest. 

How Am I Feeling?

Thanks for asking! Leading up to the diagnosis–looking back now–I was feeling overly tired and sore after routine workouts. For a couple years I have had a DIY basement exercise routine consisting of 20 minutes of Apple Fitness weight training, followed by 30 grinding minutes up to a 145 bpm pace on the retro Finnish stationary cycle my dear neighbor Sally gifted me.

This was my commitment at age 65 to try staying on top of the inevitable sloughing off of muscle and the ever-creeping accumulation of mid-section fat. I was feeling pretty great about staying on the lean side, down to about 160 pounds on a 5’8″ frame. But man these workouts sapped my energy.

Then I experienced Atrial Fibrillation (AFib) one random early March afternoon. In the basement rowdily playing tug of war with Zayna and Zoe (our adorable Australian Shepherd sisters) I felt a sharp, zingy vibration in my chest, what is called “flutters”. Not that I hadn’t rarely experienced a slight flutter sensation in my chest, but these were not slight, nor did they go away (lasting 3 minutes).

I quickly sat on the couch to stabilize myself, mind racing to understand the sensation. The fluttering became a crescendo of heavy erratic heart thumps, like a wild bull was set loose in my chest. Remembering the stories of a dear friend who has had several bouts of AFib, these jarring symptoms rang a bell. I fingered my Apple Watch, looking for the ECG app. Somehow I kept enough sense to calmly press on the crown for 30 seconds to get the reading you see above.

This might have been my best quick response of my life, which isn’t saying much! But sharing my ECG reading gave the ER docs a quick path to assess the relative seriousness of my health condition, leading more directly to the rapid fire tests that informed my diagnosis.

And Now for the Main Event!

Long story short, an amazing team at the University of Washington Heart Institute has guided me through the decisions leading up to Wednesday’s open heart surgery. My valve apparently is progressively deteriorating, and my shortness of breath is more pronounced since diagnosis. I’m quite tired by the middle of each day, which is an astonishing change in a short time. It is scary, but unlike so many, this condition was discovered early, and I am not being rushed into a surgery to save my life!

SO, LET’S GO TEAM!

My amazing husband, who has been by my side holding me up every moment, will give surgical updates Wednesday afternoon to our close friends and family. Sometime around 6 or 7 days after surgery, I will come home to begin earnestly tackling full recovery and eventual return to work. And my intention is to chronicle this new chapter on this blog. (And eventually tell all my other stories!)

Next year this time I plan to be on a mountaintop again like my son Josh, son-in-law Ryan, and I were a couple summers ago on Mount Adams. That’s the vision that keeps me focused past the chest-cracking part.