The last newsletter, Hello from the brink of death (https://buttondown.com/Cornellbox/archive/hello-from-the-brink-of-death/) certainly had a provocative title, but it also left a hanging question: what happened next? How's recovery going? What's the new normal?

The surgery happened (a couple weeks ago; end of August), and I'm still here, just now with a frankensteined heart, and a couple small cuts in arm and leg, where some other blood vessels were harvested for the reworking. My dad had this same surgery 25 years ago, and there are notable differences I can observe. I recall my dad had a long slash along his leg, which needed to have a dressing changed on it, and he needed assistance with that since he couldn't bend over and reach. I've only got a couple of small snips in an arm and a leg - presumably the ends of the vessels they harvested - and the rest of it was done laproscopically. Even the chest incision was closed without any sutures; dad had a line scar with a row of dots on either side; I've got just the line. There was some part of the tubes and wires that I was attached to at the hospital that covered that part of my chest. That came off when it came time to discharge me, and it was already healing and knitting back together.

I had thought that recovery would be a slower process than it has been. I was looking forward to a more gradual process of returning strength and capability. (I'm still not allowed to lift more than 10 pounds, and some other restrictions, until after my follow-up at the end of this month, but I think that I'll be mostly cleared to do things after that.) I was supposed to walk around a bit each day, and try to go a bit farther every day, which I thought would be a slow ramping (and the first couple days home, that seemed much more the case), but it's gone much more in the direction of a hockey-stick graph. I paced out a loop a few hundred feet long in the church parking lot next door, and I did increasing numbers of laps for a couple days. Then I started going along on dog walks. Since our dogs are stupid, and big enough to potentially injure me if they were to lunge at a dog across the street, or a squirrel or a bunny, I don't hold any leashes, for now. We did a couple days last week where I went along and then turned back for home, and Stacia went a bit further. But, by last Friday, I was walking the whole distance, nearly a mile, and I've been doing that this past week, as well. Not only the distance, but the pace of those walks has been as fast as it was back in July and August.

Even just one week after the surgery, I did a zoom call in to a gathering of some of my friends. Literally one week earlier, I had been spatchcocked and laid out in a surgical theater for a major procedure, and now I was at home talking to them normally. At one point, the question of what kind of procedure I'd had came up - whether it was the angioplasty (run a cable through your circulatory system up to the heart), or whether it was the full menu, cut you open and re-work the arteries of the heart. Since I was already at home talking with them, it must've been the former. In fact, I told them, I had both. The invasive angioplasty was investigational, and also might've been the extent of it. If they had found less blockage, it's possible they could have treated my condition with a stent (or a couple stents, depending on what they'd found), and that would have taken care of it and I would have been back home a day or two later. But, instead they found the more complete blockages, and so I was scheduled for the full cardiac arterial bypass graft. And, yeah, just one week later, I was already at home and talking to those friends.

When I was in the hospital, and facing the month of September as a recovery month before I could do much of anything, one of the things that was most disappointing for me was that we had gotten tickets for a jazz show at the Freighthouse in Ypsilanti in September. I'll be stuck at home, recovering, I thought at that time. But then, as I've been bouncing back more quickly than I ever anticipated, getting back towards normal, the idea of going to that show seemed a lot more conceivable. And even, last week, we said, if I could do a full dog walk by Friday, then we would plan on walking (it's only a bit more than a mile from the house) to the show. So that is the plan for this evening - we're going to have a date night and go to one of our favorite local restaurants and then go to that show.

So, I'm still trying to figure out what the new normal is going to be. I am off from work through the beginning of October, though I have my work computer at home now, so I can check in on things periodically, just to see if anything is going on, and to say hi to folks. Hopefully, what is going to happen once I am cleared for returning to work is that I will mostly work from home for a few weeks. I already have two days a week scheduled with cardiac rehab, and it will be easier to go do that and then come back home and work on things here. There may be some things I'll need to go in for, but hopefully I can ease back into it that way. The folks I work with have generally been supportive like that, and I hope it will work out well that way for all of us.

I've been given some dietary restrictions (pretty strict sodium restrictions, in particular), and so we're finding some new things to include and to adjust our customary menu. Stacia has invented some interesting dishes that may become new regulars for us. I also found some things while I was in the hospital. I had a Michigan cherry salad at the hospital a couple of times that I really liked, and we've tried re-creating it at home: a salad with grilled chicken on top along with cherries, slivered almonds, grated carrot and shredded cheese. For hospital food, it was actually good, and, as something tasty and healthy for me, it's nice to have in the repertoire. Stacia has also improvised some Indian-inspired dishes, and we're coming up with a bunch of adaptations, and new things that are (sometimes surprisingly) workable for my new diet and also quite tasty (cheesecake, for instance, can be okay). And tonight's plan is for our local Thai restaurant for our date night.

It’s pretty remarkable, overall, how quickly I’ve gotten back to feeling relatively like my old self. There’s a tightness in my sternum, still, and coughing or sneezing can be a bit of an adventure. But a lot is comfortable and familiar, and I’m starting to settle into the new normal, which doesn’t seem to be profoundly different from the old normal. And hopefully those new changes are for the better.