Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On (2024)

"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar." - Stephen King

This is Part V of a multi-part story. It’s a longer read, but it’s worth it, and it’s the final part!

If you haven’t yet, you’ll understand this better if you read Parts I-IV first:

Part I - The First Hour: April 12, 1989

Part II - Everything's Okay, But...

Part III - Pizza and a Movie

Part IV - A Sister, a Seatbelt, and a Bake Sale

With my sister gone to Flagstaff for grad school, she no longer wrote in her journal about the details of our days, so I don’t have that to refer back to. I don’t remember when my husband was “finished” with all of his therapies. I don’t remember ever sitting down with him to do homework pages like my sister had done over the summer. I believe daily life became his therapy, and he continued to improve slowly in all aspects of his recovery over the next months and even years!

Fortunately, I didn’t have a complicated pregnancy, but I remember being extremely uncomfortable in the final week. My journal says, “Mom and Tony took me out for drives, but mostly I sat on the couch, exhausted.” Other than for my husband’s medical issues, my pregnancy was normal and easy.

My labor was not easy. I had severe back pain for over 24 hours before the baby started to show signs of distress and the doctors decided to do a C-section. I was, “relieved to know it would be over soon.”

I think my mom, my brother, and his girlfriend were in the waiting room all that time. My husband was with me in the delivery room and in the surgery room when our son was born. My journal says he, “encouraged me, helped me breathe, talked to me, held my hand, and pressed against my back.” He was in the transitional nursery while our son was weighed, measured, and bathed. He was so proud!

Our son was a healthy 9 pounds and 1 ounce when he was born on Monday, September 11, 1989. His 12th birthday was on 9/11/2001, a story for another day. And yes, this is the same son who became a father himself 24 days ago.

We were released from the hospital on Thursday. My journal states, “Tony and Mom came to pick us up from the hospital. After we got home, Tony had to leave for some tests at the doctor’s office. It was nice to be home, but pretty much uneventful.” I’m guessing his tests had to do with his upcoming heart surgery, and I’m surprised that I considered that uneventful.

I remember the next month as being happy and relaxed. We spent our days watching our son sleep, going for walks with him in his stroller, and taking photo after photo. One day, we took him to my workplace to show him off. The only thing I remember from that visit is that one of my co-workers expressed sympathy for the fact that I’d had a C-section. I remember laughing and saying that, other than the fact that it hurt to cough or laugh, compared to brain surgery, I had nothing to complain about.

But our next hurdle was coming up soon. My husband was scheduled for his second open-heart surgery on October 16th, to replace his artificial aortic valve that had been damaged by the infection that caused his stroke.

Shortly before the surgery, his mother flew to Tucson from Wisconsin. I remember I was not excited about that. We were and still are grateful for all the help and support our families gave us. However, we’d had people living in our home for the better part of five months, and my relationship with my mother-in-law was, um, challenging. We needed and appreciated her help, and wanted her to meet her newest grandchild, but it did make things somewhat tense and uncomfortable.

Fortunately, since this was a planned surgery rather than an emergency, it would be fairly routine, if open-heart surgery can be considered routine. The only complication I remember was that my husband had existing scar tissue from his first heart surgery which made things harder for the surgeon.

I remember having our son with us in the waiting room on the day of surgery, and that the presence of a one-month-old baby helped to distract us and at least two other families with loved ones undergoing surgery that day. I remember that we exchanged Christmas cards with those families for years.

I’m sure my husband looked awful in the recovery room and the ICU once again, but I don’t remember any details this time. What I do remember is that, in the evening of the following day, October 17th, there was an earthquake in San Francisco, 6.9 on the Richter scale. Sixty-three people lost their lives, nearly 3800 people were injured, and there was $6 billion in damage. I remember watching the TV in my husband’s hospital room and seeing the live pre-game broadcast of part of the World Series interrupted when the power went out in Candlestick Park.

I remember being in that hospital room, with our new baby and a husband who’d had a stroke, brain surgery, and heart surgery within the past six months, and feeling lucky. Ironically, I remember also thinking what a story the earthquake would make to tell our son about some day.

Meanwhile, I was about to return to work full-time. My brother has recently cleared up some haziness in my memories. He reminded me that I had not gone back to work during the three weeks my husband was in the hospital after his stroke in April. Instead, I used all of my sick and vacation time and spent those weeks with him at the hospital. When it came time for my maternity leave and my husband’s heart surgery, my brother and some other co-workers donated some of their vacation time to me, so I was fortunate to have another 6 or 7 weeks off, from early September to late October. But now, my time was up.

My pregnancy journal tells me that my mom had to go back to Wisconsin at the end of October, but my husband wasn’t supposed to drive, nor lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk, for several weeks after his surgery. Our son certainly weighed more a milk jug by then.

My mother-in-law stayed another month to help, and again, we were grateful. But I remember it as a difficult couple of weeks. Of course, I did not want to go back to work and leave my baby and my husband. Unfortunately, it was harder than it should have been because his mother refused to do things the way I asked her to. But somehow, we managed.

Finally, four weeks after my husband’s second heart surgery, we were alone in our home for the first time in six months, and my husband took over full-time care of our two-month-old son.

He never returned to the job he had been working at when he had the stroke in April. But despite the doctors’ predictions that he would never earn a college degree and never again work full-time, and maybe even partly because of their predictions, he eventually started taking night classes at Pima Community College.

It took about 8 years, but he eventually got a bachelor’s degree in Sustainability from Prescott College, and he has worked full-time ever since. He has worked as a hardware store clerk, a house builder, a park ranger, a Jeep tour guide, and a groundskeeper. Some of those jobs required him to memorize and give lengthy speeches to tourists. In 2005, he was even awarded, “Interpreter of the Year,” from the Arizona State Parks.

I have stories about the birth of our second son, our move to Flagstaff, hiking and camping around the western United States with our boys, my own health issues, and much more. But those stories are for other days.

During the years we raised our boys, my husband had relatively good health, with the exception of a couple of minor incidents including a bloody drive to the emergency room, with two young boys in the back seat, when he lost his grip on his power drill and drilled into his right hand. But life reached a point where everything felt normal. If you had met my husband then, you would never have known everything he had been through.

Then, as tends to happen, life changed again after both boys were grown and out of the house. In 2014, my husband had cardiac arrest and then had an ICD (pacemaker/defibrillator) implanted. I kid you not. More trauma, more scars. But he miraculously survived once again, despite overwhelming odds. And since then, he has had a third open-heart surgery to replace his mitral valve with an artificial one, a kidney biopsy, an ICD battery replacement surgery, and possibly a mini-stroke or two. More stories for more days. Perhaps. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

Ironically, so much time had passed that our older son was living out of state by then. But our younger son was still in Flagstaff attending Northern Arizona University for his degree in Forestry, so he was the son in the surgery waiting room for most of the recent medical emergencies. And my mom, who was retired by then, came to live with us again a couple more times.

All things considered, my husband is doing pretty well today. But he still has limited feeling on the right side of his body, walks with a slight limp, and struggles with his short term memory. And because of the stroke and the cardiac arrest, I worry about the damage his brain has suffered and what it could lead to in the future.

He also still suffers from lingering aphasia now and then. His brain doesn’t express itself exactly the way I or many people would. Mostly, this means that he sometimes has a hard time coming up with the “right” words, but we can usually still laugh about it.

Through it all, my husband has maintained his positive attitude and great sense of humor. Often, when we are climbing into bed at night, he says, “No one’s in the hospital,” by which he means, “It’s been a good day.”

I spend too much time thinking about the past: how quickly time flies, how things can change in an instant, how hard change often is. But I know life is all about change and how we respond to it even when we don’t have a choice.

I can’t help but wonder, though, what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to work on April 12th, 1989, or if we had called 911 on April 10th when he had that horrible headache, or if the doctors had kept him in the hospital that February until the endocarditis infection was gone from his body instead of sending him home with a port and intravenous Vancomycin.

And I wonder if this event that has defined the last 35 years of our lives - this event that was the fundamental reason behind so many of the decisions we’ve made, from how we raised our boys, to the jobs we held on to, to how we’ve approached our retirements - if this event had never happened, would that have been a good thing? Or did most of the good in our lives come about because of what happened on April 12, 1989?

One day last fall, when I was just beginning to think about writing on Substack, my husband and I were talking about something that had happened a long time ago, when our boys were young and still lived at home. I was using phrases such as, “time passes too quickly,” and, “where did the time go?” and, “it feels like it was yesterday.”

My husband spoke up and said, “it’s Just a Blink.” And now you know.

There is one exception, that I am aware of, to the perception of time passing quickly. It’s called hospital time. Clocks have no function in a hospital. Nothing happens on a schedule. You can wait until 2 pm for an 8 am procedure. You can wait until 4 pm for lunch to arrive. You can wait until 6 pm for a morning release. Time is suspended while you wonder how other people can be doing their grocery shopping or picking up their kids from school or going to see a movie. Hospital time drags on like there is no tomorrow, or no today. If you’ve spent time in a hospital, you know.

But in my experience, with that one exception, time passes in the blink of an eye. Things change, life goes on. It’s been 35 years since this story took place. In three days, on June 2nd, we will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. In three weeks, we will fly to visit our first grandchild.

Many, many years ago, when I first heard the Stephen King quote I’ve used to begin each part of this story, I knew that he was whispering right into my heart. I knew that one day I would write this story about my husband’s physical scars and my emotional scars. It was just a matter of time. Thank you for the inspiration, Stephen. It is an incredible relief to have it written.

But I will leave you with one more quote, an appropriate “ending” for our ongoing story. It’s part of the lyrics from one of my favorite songs by my most favorite storyteller. (Shhh, don’t tell Stephen!) I still struggle to follow this wise advice in the ups and downs of daily life, but if my husband had a motto, this would be it.

If a hurricane doesn't leave you deadIt will make you strongDon't try to explain it, just nod your headBreathe in, breathe out, move on - Jimmy Buffett

Listen to the whole song here. You’ll be glad you did!

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