T-8 - The day of my heart attack

T-8. The verbiage of astronauts and missile launches. And in this case, someone about to have bypass surgery. Why astronaut/missile launch lingo? Because it's easy to count down and up using that lingo. Normally it's "T Minus" that is used by most people but I remember NASA using the "T Plus" as well. Only I will be using days instead of minutes, such as T minus 1 "day". And what is T minus Zero? The day of my surgery.

January 29th, 2012 was my T-8 day. It was evening but I'm not sure what time exactly. I was playing Lord of the Rings Online as I do on many nights. Gaming has been one of my hobbies for years. The problem solving, puzzles, strategy, etc. of gaming keeps my mind thinking.

So there I was, doing something in-game, when my upper arms started hurting. I told the paramedics when they arrived that it was like lifting weights for a long time but my Brother-In-Law Randy Stout had a better comparison. It's like having your arms in blood pressure cups that are too tight and don't loosen.

I also started to sweat. Not a heavy sweat but not a 'perspire' either. Something wasn't quite right. I thought I was coming down with something. I got up from the computer and headed back to the bedroom, stopping at the bathroom on the way.

Lisa, my wife, must have seen me from the living room where she and Kristin were watching something because she was soon asking me if I was okay and what was going on. I told her I didn't feel good and was going to lie down for a bit. I just felt "off".

Fortunately for me I have two very smart women in my life who jumped on the internet and realized that what I needed wasn't to lie down for a bit but to go to the hospital. I vaguely remember my wife talking on the phone to someone. I realize now that it had to be the hospital.

Lisa came back to the bedroom and said "We're taking you to the hospital". I, being the big lug that I can be sometimes, thought she was driving me there. Out of bed I got to go get my coat. About that time the ambulance arrived and Lisa explained she wasn't driving me but I was going in the ambulance.

I was in the ambulance for a while, answering questions the paramedic asked, having my vitals checked, and being monitored. The paramedic asked me if I had ever had Nitroglycerin. I told her no, I hadn't. Perhaps if I had I might have known what was going on. She explained that it would open my arteries and veins so the blood could flow better.

Once we arrived at the hospital, they wheeled me into the ER and took my vitals again. Everything looked good except for my EKG. It was a little bit off. At some point they decided they needed to keep me overnight at the Parkview Heart Institute to perform a heart catheterization on Monday. So I said night to Lisa and they wheeled me over to the PVHI. I was on several drugs to make my blood cells slippery and to keep the arteries/veins open big. Essentially to keep the blood flowing. I slept rather well, all things considered. The drugs were doing what they needed to do to, the staff at the Heart Institute were checking on me frequently, and I was monitored and cared for throughout the night.

Tomorrow's post will pick up with my journey to the cath lab.

Just a footnote: I will be combining several of the days before and after my surgery into one or two blog posts since there wasn't a whole lot happening on each specific day that I can remember. Those days immediately before and after are a bit of a blur so it's easier to just combine them, hitting the highlights.

Blog Reboot..Click, Click, Whirrrr!

Returning home from the hospital after my bypass surgery, I wanted some way to document my recovery. Some way to look back on the early days and see what kind of progress I had made over the course of the weeks and months.

And if perchance someone else could learn from my recovery, I wanted to place it where others could find it and read it. Something more than Twitter or Facebook (both of which I use). So I opted to reboot my blog that hadn't been used in over a year plus.

So here it is, a new background, a slightly revised layout, and for now, new purpose.

I took quite a while to find a background I liked. I finally choose this one because of what I saw in it. My guess it that it's a glass of wine with crackers but I saw something slightly different.

The glass is a glass of apple juice. This has become my favorite drink over the last couple days. It's refreshing, clean, and pure. It quenches the thirst and has just enough sweetness to make the palate sing.

The crackers are those baked kind that go "Snap!" when you bend them in half. Crisp, sodium-free, pure cracker flavor. Perfect for topping with some sun-dried tomatoes, thin sliced cucumbers, or maybe even a spinach dip/spread. I'll probably think of more things as I stare at the crackers :)

The doily is one of those doilies my Grandma's always had for keeping things off of the end tables. Makes a lot of sense to me as I grow older. Look at the picture and see. The doily is keeping the glass and crackers from damaging the table. And at the same time it is tying the images of the glass and crackers together without becoming the focal point of the image. Which Grandma's doily? That I'll have to think about :)

So there it is. My interpretation of the background I'm using. I didn't make the background but I sure do like it a lot.

Are left-leaning journalists scared of the right wing?

I recently received an e-mail from a friend with the interesting subject line "Should Christians respect Obama?" (link to site with complete e-mail). While I don't know if the content of the e-mail is indeed from David Barton, I was curious enough to try to find out. I never did find out but I did learn some things.

What I found out is that several left-leaning "journalists" are concerned about David Barton and what he says. Rob Boston and Chris Rodda both have quite a bit to say. And there were several more sites found in my google search that started out much the same way. These "journalists" seem to be most concerned with Barton's inaccuracies of history. But they do little to actually prove he is lying, something they both claim.

For instance, Rob Boston claims that Barton is "lying". 'But Barton's biggest whopper concerns Thomas Jefferson, who coined the metaphor "wall of separation between church and state." Jefferson used that phrase in an 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association. According to Barton, Jefferson went on to add that the "wall" was meant to be "one directional," protecting the church from the state but not the other way around, and, furthermore, that it was intended to keep "Christian principles in government."'

This little bit about separation of church and state interested me enough that off to google I went.

First stop, "Separation of church and state in the United States"on wikipedia. While I recognize that anyone with a wikipedia account can create or change pages as they wish, and that inaccuracies are possible on wikipedia, I don't believe this page or others related to our government are going to have that issue. There are too many moderators and other folks who will correct the inaccuracies.

Regardless of that, the first paragraph actually discusses the very letter that Jefferson wrote to Danbury Baptist Assoc. And it states the relevant portion of the First Amendment, that is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ."

So is this a one way street as Barton claims or not? One thing that must be remembered is that the new United States had declared freedom from a country that had an "official" church, aka The Church of England. Many of the Founding Father's were Christian's, but they were not all of the same denomination. In fact, it was a fairly diverse group as listed here. What they didn't want was for the government to tell people what religion they had to belong to or to have an "officially recognized church". What Jefferson was really saying to the Danbury Baptists was "Dudes, chill. We won't let the government do what was done in Britain. We'll put up a wall between church and state so you are safe."

What Jefferson didn't say was that the churches couldn't make their opinions known to the government. He didn't say there shouldn't be prayer in schools. He didn't say that every trace of God should be removed from government. And why would he? As a Christian, that just wouldn't make sense.

It wasn't until the Supreme Court had to begin interpretting the First Amendment that things got a bit screwy. As this big melting pot we all live in began to have more religions, and people opposed to religion of any kind. And as those people became "offended" at the very principles our country was founded on.

Maybe Mr. Barton doesn't always get his history correct. Maybe he interprets things towards his side just a little. But doesn't the left do the very same thing? Or do they believe their minority viewpoint is the only correct one?

I think left-leaning journalists are scared of people like Mr. Barton. And they should be. Because it's people like Mr. Barton that get people like me to start looking at documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and what they really say. And they don't want us reading those documents, thinking about what they say, and then speaking up. It might reveal how far we've come from what our Founding Father's stood far, what their beliefs were, and what their vision for the U.S. was.

It might also make us realize that without being "under God", we would not be "One nation".