The Lazarus of University of Washington Hospital

On May 28, 2009 at the tender age of 41 years old I suffered a life-ending heart attack while bicycling to work in Seattle. Thankfully, the story doesn’t end with the heart attack. I’m still alive. This is an attempt to begin telling my story.

I feel better than I have in years. I also have a lot of work to do to begin losing the excess weight I’ve been carrying and to return to my former levels of activity. But I am profoundly grateful for that opportunity. I would have left behind a beautiful, incredible wife and 5 children – four girls and a boy, ages 5 to 15.

First, a little bit about me and who I am. I am the second of four children to wonderful parents who raised me well, loved me a lot, and help to foster much of the foundation for the man I am today. I grew up in Newport Hills, South of Bellevue, Washington. I attended grade school at Newport Hills elementary, junior high school at Ringdall Junior High and high school at Newport High. In high school, I graduated fourth in my class with a 3.96 grade point average. My upbringing was in a run-of-the-mill, middle class community.

I was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. “the Mormons”), which I mention because it forms a significant foundation for who I am. After a year of college, I served a two year mission for the Church in Switzerland. After returning home, I graduated from Brigham Young University in the top 10% of my class (Cum Laud) in 1990 after just under 4 years. The university required a minimum of 128 college credits to graduate; I had 128½. Several years later, I met Katie Arrowsmith, to whom I’ve been married for over 16 years.

(Note: I do not expect the readers here or those who so marvelously worked to save my life, to adopt or even agree with my beliefs. Just know that my religion is an inseparable component of the lens through which I view this and so many other events of my life. If you want to know my conclusion up front, the circumstances surrounding my heart attack and the people who just happened to be there treating me that day constitute a true miracle – I’m just not that lucky. However, every reader and participant is certainly entitled to their own opinion.)

At the time of my heart attack, I had been working at NetMotion Wireless for 8 years as Director of Product Management. The company is too old to be called a start-up and has managed to carve out a niche in the wireless security arena and become profitable recently, although it is still venture capitalist owned. This was not the first software start-up I have worked at. I started my software start-up career with my father during high school, and then resumed it after graduation from college. Since then I’ve worked at 5 software companies, all in various stages of “start-up.” Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to cash in one solitary option of stock at any of them. I spent my “dot-com” years at a dot-com that has since gone under. The stories one typically hears of Seattle software types making it big, don’t apply to me.

At the time of the heart attack, I had been serving for 2 years in an unpaid position as the bishop of my congregation (ward). This generally requires 15 to 20 hours each week, spent mostly on evenings and Sundays. Bishop is not the type of position one volunteers for. It’s a calling that, in the Church, one neither seeks nor declines. While there is no set duration of service, one usually serves for from five to eight years. After two years, I felt like I was just starting to hit my stride.

I love serving as bishop, and I understand that some of my earliest words after having the breathing tube removed while in intensive care were requesting that my secretary cancel my appointments for the week. Katie tells me she reassuringly told me not to worry. Some people have been surprised to learn that the heart attack has not necessitated a release from the calling. For that I am grateful. I believe one of the reasons my life was so miraculously preserved is because there was still work for me to do – in my family first, but also at church and in my profession. I am profoundly grateful that I’ve been given the gift to complete that work, for however many years the Lord decides I need to remain. I hope it will be many.

I suppose the story can’t be fully told without at least paying some homage to the years leading up to the heart attack. My nick name as a baby was “Buddha.” My mother could not breast feed, so I was a true-blue formula baby. Although a scant 6 lbs. 3 oz. at birth, I quickly ballooned into a very happy, albeit chubby baby. I spent most of my child hood on the chubby side – I wouldn’t say “fat,” but certainly chubby through my grade school years.

Things changed in junior high school where I became obsessed with football and weight lifting. The once chubby adolescent blossomed into a well-built, physically fit athlete. The plan at the time was that I would continue to grow and be tall like my father, who is six foot three. Unfortunately, I’ve grown only one inch since entering junior high school at five foot seven. In ninth grade, our junior high-school football team won the district championship. In high school, I made varsity football my sophomore year and was junior varsity team co-captain.

At the beginning of my junior year, I suffered two discouraging injuries at the beginning of the football season: First I sprained the S.I. joint in my back. After a few weeks off to recuperate, I returned and severely sprained my ankle during my first game back – my foot was black and blue from my pinky toe to my knee. The rest of the season was a wash. Later that winter, a kind girlfriend introduced me to snow skiing. I was immediately addicted, and it didn’t take long for me to decide it would be a lot more fun to pursue snow skiing than football. So I abdicated my pursuit of football entirely in favor of weight lifting, rehabbing my back and my ankle, and getting ready for the next ski season. I loved skiing and enjoyed not needing to carry around the extra weight that football usually required in order to excel.

After my first year at college, at 19 years old, I served a two-year mission for my church in German-speaking Switzerland. The opportunity to serve others for that time also afforded me the chance to completely convalesce from all my high-school injuries. Serving there changed my life, but that’s a story I have already documented in two large journals I kept. Although I began my mission at about 165 pounds, I ended it 20 pounds heavier – thanks in large part to the impeccable Swiss cheeses and chocolates and yogurts. For a brief period during my mission I was on a bicycle in the foothills of the alps, but for nearly the remainder of my time, I traveled by a car.

After I returned home, I went back to college and roomed with a former missionary friend who served with me in Switzerland. He introduced me to road biking. I bought a Cannondale road bike while home for the summer between semesters, and I began logging miles. A hundred miles a week at first. Then before long, I was averaging two hundred to three hundred. It was an excellent summertime counterpart to winter time snow skiing. And I loved doing both.

I graduated college in Spring of 1990, weighing in at 164 lbs., a pound lighter than I was in seventh grade. I also graduated with a torn left ACL – due to my supposed invincibility on the ski slopes. I had a mogul-skiing addiction: The more and the bigger and the faster, the happier I was. Before getting the ACL repaired the next Fall, I trained for and biked the Seattle-to-Portland (affectionately known in the Seattle area as the STP), a 200 mile, one-day event. During the work week I would usually bike 40 miles twice and 20 miles once. Then the weekend was reserved for something between 80 and 120 miles – a lot of time in the saddle! I completed the STP in very respectable 10 hours 8 minutes even though my second hundred miles was completely solo. I had graduated from my Cannondale to an Eddie Merckx grand prix sporting Dura-Ace components – a graduation gift from my parents. Finally, after suffering additional knee damage playing volleyball at a work picnic, I got the ACL repaired. The winter was dark and dreary, now out of the house and living alone in my own apartment in Redmond. I spent time rehabilitating my knee several days a week before work. On New Year’s Day, I took my new knee for a cold but dry spin on the Burke-Gilman trail.

I met my future wife, Katie the following summer, in 1992, and life (meaning biking and skiing) slowed down a little to enjoy time with my new companion to-be. My weight also never quite returned to the slim days of college. I seemed to be permanently at about 180 pounds, due to enjoying eating out with my fiancé and due to the effects of a “desk job” in the computer software industry.

I shouldn’t fail to mention at this point that during our engagement, my father suffered a heart attack at the tender age of 49. So there were clearly some genetics in play with my heart attack. But I never paid much attention to its warning to me personally. I may be his son, but I didn’t think I had inherited the same genetics. He’s 6 foot 3. I’m 5 foot 8. There was no other heart disease in the family that we knew of. And we all concluded his heart attack was “certainly stress related.” But this was a tough time for all of us kids. We love our father, and drew close together as a family during that time to support him and my mom through a seaming endless series of complications after his open heart surgery.

In December, 1992, only a week after returning home from Katie’s and my honeymoon to Hawaii, I went skiing with a friend to Stevens Pass, my first time skiing after the surgery. On the back side, I got going way too fast for early season, hit a bump that looked like a jump, and tore my other leg’s ACL. I also came away with a black eye. It seems both my knees’ structural tolerances were within a few bumps of each other. It was a tough blow physically and psychologically. And Katie’s initial exposure to her new husband was less than optimal. During the ensuing winter, I quickly put on weight, expanding from a 34 inch waist to a 38 in waist to a 42 in waist faster than I thought possible. The need to support a wife and growing family and develop a career also caused me to foolishly change my priorities, favoring working late at night and on weekends over staying physically active. The software industry’s (and my) love for pizza and soda pop did me no favors, either.

After a few years of marriage, I remember deciding I needed to start biking to and from work again from my office on Mercer Island to our first home in Kirkland. The scant 12 miles were utterly brutal on my poor, out-of-shape body. At the end of the first attempt at biking home, I was much too grateful to be home, nearly collapsing at the door step. My personality is such that I don’t enjoy doing anything I can’t do well, and I think the effort to “get back to my fighting weight” just seemed impossibility at the time, as our family grew and my career progressed. The bikes and skis sat in the garage collecting dust for over a decade. Stupid.

Fast forward 10 years: A few years ago after our fifth child came, my wife, Katie, felt the need to reclaim her body after finally finishing nursing. She began exercising and encouraging me to do so, too. My weight had ballooned even more, and despite some minor successes with the Adkins diet (a nice way, I thought, to lose weight without working at it) I was now 290 pounds. So far from the promised land—over 100 pounds--that it seemed an impossibility to ever get back down. Nonetheless, we refreshed some ski gear and went skiing for the first time since my second ACL replacement, over a decade earlier. We even took the kids. And the second year, we bought them gear and skied a few times as a family.

I remember the summer before my heart attack feeling some internal urgency around getting my weight back down to a more reasonable level. I wasn’t sleeping well, I was always a little tired, and I really wanted to have more fun skiing. Gravity is not friendly to a 290 pound snow skier. Carrying that much weight down the slopes and keeping it all under control is sometimes more work than fun. I was never “happy” being big, but I felt it was the required sacrifice to maintain all my other obligations at home, at work and at church. So I tuned up my 1990-vintage Specialized Stumpjumper Comp mountain bike and made it in to a commuting bike, with road slicks and fenders. (Don't forget, it definitely rains in Seattle.) The prized Eddie Merckx frame was certainly not made for a near-three hundred pound rider!

The first few times out riding were brutal, but I quickly developed some biking legs, got over the saddle soreness, and managed to commute one way on consecutive days in to work on the Burke-Gilman trail – a little over 18 miles from our home in Woodinville in to the office in Fremont on the shores of Lake Union. To encourage my good start, Katie bought me a waterproof biking coat and a nice bright bike light for our 16th anniversary. It allowed me to extend commuting until late November of 2008. Finally, the snows of Winter 2008 arrived and the bike stayed in the garage until April 2009. Riding in the rain sucks. Commuting in the rain really sucks, especially when it's dark. And it gets dark in Seattle at 4pm during the Winter.

The evening before my heart attack, I biked home from work as usual and Katie picked me up at the bottom of brickyard road – peddling 300 pounds up Brickyard Road just wasn’t a possibility without the use of my smallest chain ring, which was now inaccessible due to a failing shifter. I got up Thursday morning and was in a hurry to get out of the garage. I only remember saying goodbye to my 12 year old daughter, Abigail.

Up until the heart attack I had managed to commute about 6 times, 2 days a week, 16 to 18 miles each way, (depending on whether I got picked up at the Bothell landing park at the bottom of the hill.) I was signed up with a team at work for the commute-to-work challenge and was planning to do my first round-trip commute on the day of the heart attack.

As I approached the UW campus that morning, about 16 miles into the ride, I began to feel some tightness in my chest. Faint at first, but it quickly increased to the point that my chest was burning and I began weighing my options, realizing what was likely happening. Thankfully, I was approaching the pedestrian overpass from the trail to the UW hospital. I turned left onto the pedestrian overpass and coasted as much as possible turning into the main load/unload area of the hospital.

I yelled at the valet in the booth that I was having a heart attack, laid my bike down and, out of instinct and pain, lay down on the sidewalk outside the front doors after taking off my helmet. I faintly remember someone coming up and talking to me, but I have no memory of what was said or how I responded. I’ve been told the first person to talk with me was a nurse who was entering the building having just gotten off a bus. A stretcher was quickly rushed out and, I’m told, that as I attempted to climb on the stretcher, I passed out.

Before I go further, it’s worth knowing that the University of Washington Hospital doesn’t typically take heart-attack patients, that is, unless they are lying on their doorstep. Heart attack patients are typically routed to Harborview Hospital in downtown Seattle. At the hospital, I was blessed with a team of senior cardiologists, stat nurses, and others: My own personal “dream team” in one of the finest teaching hospitals in the country. I’ve been told that important people on the team would not normally have been there. "Coincidence" had them on-call.

Here’s where the details may or may not be entirely accurate, but I will put down what I’ve been told:

They tried for 45-minutes to revive me without success. I have heard that many of the physicians, nurses and staff in the hospital began referring to me as Lazarus due to the amount of time they spent trying to revive me. Days later when I moved out of the ICU, I became aware of a large scab on my sternum, which I believe is attributable to 45 minutes of CPR, causing bruising and abrasion to that area. God bless each person whose palms did that for that amount of time. Having been trained in CPR as a boy scout, I know that even 5 minutes of CPR is a serious work out on the person doing it. Several weeks later, where the scab was there’s now just a red discoloration on the skin, which will likely fade more with time. But perhaps it’s my own little reminder in the mirror each morning of these events. What a tragedy if I were to ever forget!

After 45 minutes, the team was out of ideas and considering “calling it,” having exhausted all their usual methods – CPR is usually only done for 20 to 25 minutes. But the stat nurse, Robin, implored the team, “Come on. He is only 42 years old. What haven’t we tried?” Someone suggested they could go old school and try epinephrine. The pharmacist immediately held up a vial and said, “I have it right here.” After two doses – I believe this is considered high – it dilated my circulatory system and my heart started pumping on its own. Before long I was in the catheter lab receiving two stents in two heart arteries, one (the “widow maker”) 100% clogged and the other about 90% clogged. A third artery wasn’t treated because it was only 50% occluded – better treated with drugs, diet, and exercise than with a stent, I’m told. (I am also told that for the period I was in the ER and stent lab, the UW pharmacists were so busy tending to my needs that the pharmacy wasn't able to service anyone else in the hospital needing medications to get them--for almost two hours.)

The stents now placed, I was still in critical condition and remained so for several more days. It was unclear how much brain damage, heart damaged, kidney damaged and liver damaged had been done during the time I was out. They kept me in a medically-induced coma to allow me and my heart to rest. Slowly, one small step at a time over the next few days, one system after another began to function as it should.

My first full day out of the ICU, the Cardiologist who placed my stents, Dr. Stewart—a senior teaching physician, still not retired at the age of 70—questioned me and concluded that my memory (or the fact that my memory was preserved as vividly as it was, so closely to the event as it was) had been well preserved and that they had done an excellent job of preserving brain function in those initial, critical minutes and hours. The things I shouldn’t remember I don’t (due to medication), but I can also remember everything I should. After his heart attack, my dad always said he “felt two steps dumber.” I have had no such feeling, and have successfully remembered all my 20-odd passwords to email, financial, and other online accounts. The only thing I can’t seem to remember is my ATM PIN code – but this isn’t the first time I’ve forgotten that. I actually feel clearer and more lucid than prior to the attack. Although I must confess that remembering some things has felt a bit like spooling them off a hard drive. I joke now that I went through the equivalent of a reboot.

My memory after lying down on the sidewalk outside of the hospital doesn’t seriously kick-in until Monday afternoon, a few hours before I came out of the ICU into my regular recovery room. Of Monday, I remember only that certain people visited me. From Tuesday forward, I can remember what we talked about.

I am told I was attended to by a wonderful, kind ICU nurse with whom a friend, who spent a lot of time at the hospital those first few days, was so impressed that the same nurse is now scheduled to work my friend’s daughter’s surgery at Childrens Hospital. On Tuesday, many of the people who worked to save me during those first few hours and days came to visit my room. I wish I had written all their names down.

What do you say to someone who literally saves your life?

“Thank you”…?

The English language overloads the words like Thank you. Don’t the Eskimos have a bunch of different words for snow? In Seattle, the weather forecasters have a bunch of different words for rain: Showers, Drizzle, Rain, Down, etc. There should be different words for different kinds of Thank You: One for when someone passes the pepper; another for when you are invited to dinner; another for when you’re surprised by a thoughtful gift. There ought to be a special Thank You for when someone saves your life. It should only be used for those rare but special situations.

During the time that I was in the hospital, I received a constant stream of visitors--family of course, but also close friends and many members of my LDS ward and stake. This, I know, was a difficult event for my direct family, especially for my wife and children, parents, and siblings. So many memories of my father’s heart attack came streaming back for them. From the Thursday of the heart attack, word spread quickly throughout the family, church, friends and work colleagues. I estimate there were perhaps over a thousand people praying for my preservation and recovery. I’m so pleased their prayers were answered affirmatively. While I’m peaceful about the prospects of dying, I really had so much that I still wanted to do that I would have felt disappointment not being able to continue on this earth for a while longer.

I have gone over everything many times in my head and discussed it all with my wife: There is no other place or time that the heart attack could have occurred and my life still have been preserved (without something even more miraculous occurring). I had been hiking in the mountains the weekend before. There were hundreds of places on the bike trail where a downed biker would have been little noticed and a 911 call would have taken many minutes to respond to somewhere on the trail. I could have been driving a car or my motorcycle on the freeway, etc., etc. My heart attack occurred right outside U.W. hospital – the perfect place and the perfect time.

I don’t believe it detracts from the women and men who attended to me in the hospital in the slightest when I acknowledge God’s hand in preserving my life. The team of physicians, nurses and pharmacists was a “dream-team” – my own personal dream-team. Each had been trained over many years, each was prepared, and each acted heroically to save my life. Why didn’t they stop after 25 minutes, at a point in time when they’d certainly gone beyond the call in the attempt to save me? I believe they were brought together that morning by a kind and loving God, who wove a tapestry of skill and interaction to save and preserve my life. I honor and acknowledge the years of dedication required of each of these people to learn to do what they did for me that Thursday morning and in the following days. I love each of them, and I honor their sacrifice and their efforts on my part. Without them involved, the results would have been very different, indeed. I doubt this story would be getting told – at least not by me.

After four nights in the ICU, I was moved into a regular cardiac recovery room. Anyone who’s spent the night in a hospital knows that it’s no place to sleep restfully. With my mental faculties in tact, I was very motivated to leave the hospital as soon as possible. As I started to take stock of my condition and learn the details of what had happened, it became very clear that mine was a miraculous case, not only in terms of what had been done to save my life, but also the speed of my recovery. I had numerous bruises caused by various IV’s on my arms and legs. The largest was on my left groin, caused by placing the stents through the leg artery. Almost six weeks after leaving the hospital some faint remnants of the bruise still remained.

I was VERY uncomfortable in the hospital with a sore right shoulder – a casualty of something that had happened during those initial hours or days: It could have occurred when I collapsed getting on the gurney, when they lifted me on to the gurney, during the 45 minutes of CPR – it’s unclear and it doesn’t really matter. X-rays taken of it at the hospital didn’t reveal anything but some minor arthritis. With metal stents freshly placed in my heart veins, I can’t have a an MRI for six months, so I had it scanned using ultrasound 2 weeks after returning home. My orthopedic surgeon said I had just a partial tear that should heal on it's own with a little therapy and exercise. Thankfully, the immediate soreness has slowly subsided and I’m able to sleep on my side and function normally in everyday tasks – a small price to pay for being alive.

I also became aware, after returning home, that my left leg is numb to the touch on the inside of the knee a few inches above and extending for about twelve inches down – likely caused by the stents being placed through that leg's artery and the associated bruising. I’m hopeful the nerves will regenerate, but it doesn’t really cause much of a problem. The final blemish of note was a scab that had replaced the deep bruise on my sternum, obviously caused by the extended CPR.

I was discharged from the hospital on the evening of June 3rd, six days after the heart attack. I returned to a house with the lawn mowed and flowers planted. The inside of the house had been cleaned, a kitchen cabinet door had been fixed, a hole in our stairwell wall (caused by an upset teenager several months earlier) had been repaired and the stairwell painted, and there was an air conditioner installed in the master bedroom to keep me comfortable in the hot weather of early June. All these and flowers and nearly a hundred cards and letters are a testament to the kindness and compassion of members of my congregation (ward), neighbors, friends, and of course family. My sister-in-law, Amy, had flown in from Oklahoma, and was keeping the household running with our kids, who were still in school, to allow Katie time to focus on me and being at the hospital.

I have to admit that returning home was a little nerve-racking. I was hyper-aware of my chest and heart. Any slight pain caused me to pause and take stock of whether I was having another heart attack. Thankfully, the early pains were all brief false alarms.

Although I had snored in the hospital and wore a mask hooked up to a CPAP machine to keep me sleeping without undue stress on my heart, my wife and I were surprised that my snoring was reduced from a space shuttle engine prior to my heart attack to a purring kitten afterward. Sleeping was difficult those first few nights, but soon I found that I was sleeping better than I had in years and that I was much more rested during the day.

One of the requirements my wife had for the doctors who discharged me from the hospital was that I have a sleep study scheduled. I went to the first sleep study at Harbor View Hospital in Seattle the Monday evening following my discharge from UW Hospital. (Incidentally, much of the substance of this story was drafted that first evening while I was waiting to go to sleep.) The results from the sleep study came back, revealing that I had severe sleep apnea causing my blood oxygen saturation levels to plummet dangerously low during the night. I’m now sleeping with a C-PAP machine at home to correct that problem and give my heart a needed rest. Whereas before I was never able to get enough sleep, I know wake up without an alarm at 6 am, and I usually force myself to lay in bed until 7 am.

Since I was technically dead for 45 minutes when I was in cardiac arrest, many have asked what I saw on the other side. Unfortunately, if I did see or experience anything, I don’t remember it due to the medication that kept me in a medically-induced coma for several days and that thankfully erased my memory of those traumatic first hours and days. Perhaps the only thing I can relate is that I remember distinctly feeling that I would have been very disappointed if this was it.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment after returning home was the change in diet. I love a good, rare rib-eye steak with lots of salt and fresh, cracked pepper. I always liked to eat until I felt full, too. Now I am eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, and occasional fish. My overwhelming craving was for something salty. After a month, the intense cravings went away and I’ve adjusted for the most part. (There are few things as motivating as a heart attack to get one to make significant changes in diet.) I had lost about 15 pounds during the week in the hospital, and another 10 pounds came off pretty quickly. Blood work done a month after the heart attack showed that my total cholesterol had gone down to 125, from 265 at a physical in January. My blood pressure is now 100 over 60, and my resting heart rate is under 60 beats per minute. Clearly a good chunk of these results can be attributed to medication, but it was very gratifying to see such dramatic results based on my efforts to eat better.

At the beginning of July, I started a cardiac recovery program at Evergreen Hospital. Light walking initially, but enough to begin to build my confidence in resuming exercise. I went for my first bicycle ride on July 11th, albeit with much less intensity than my ride the morning of the heart attack. It felt really good to get out on the trail on a summer evening for an hour, even if I didn’t go that far or that fast. I’m looking forward to scheduling the first post-heart attack stress-test. I’m hopeful that will clear the path to more rigorous exercise, which is definitely the key to my longer term weight loss (and survival). The bicycle will be my main activity, and I’m looking forward to getting back on the Eddy Merckx after a losing a few more pounds using the commuter bicycle.

At the time of this writing—almost seven weeks after “the event”—life is starting to return to a relatively normal routine. The initial fears that I would have a recurrence have subsided for the most part. I’m back full-time to work and serving as a bishop. I have a lot more energy. It's challenging to have so much energy and yet to exercise only lightly--the doctors don’t want me to exercise more than 30 beats above my resting heart rate—basically keep my heart rate under 100. That means I can go for walks or a gentle bike-ride. I’m hopeful the cardiologist will schedule a stress test soon, which could provide the clearance to exercise more vigorously. I’ve adjusted my eating habits significantly: Mostly fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and nuts. Fish several times a week, and lean chicken a couple times a month. I’ll allow myself one or two bites of beef or pork on occasion, but not in any significant volume. I’ve lost about 25 pounds and plan to lose at least 100 more. That seems like a lot, but I’m not on a diet any more: This is how I live—literally and figuratively.

I feel so blessed. As I reflect on the myriad of events and interactions of people that combined to have me in the right place at the right time with the right people, I feel that I’ve witnessed a powerful, personal miracle.

I had been hiking with my family in the mountains the weekend prior to the heart attack. If it had happened up there, I’d surely be dead. I could have been in a car or on my motorcycle. It could have happened the night before on my way home from work or at any point along the 16 miles I’d biked that morning along the trail to work--it happened literally right in front of the hospital, and I was on their doorstep when my heart failed.

Professionals with the perfect skills and the abilities required were there for me that morning. And they didn’t give up, even after 45 minutes of CPR. (Why not?!) My brain and other vital functions are totally normal. My heart is recovering well, and my prospects for future activity and health are very good. I didn’t have to have open heart surgery, and I was out of the hospital in a week. I feel better than I have in years. I’m not tired during the day. I’m losing weight. My wife has her husband. My children have their father. And I’ve got a second chance to fix things in my life that needed fixing anyways.

The intricate tapestry of my miracle is beautiful and somewhat overwhelming to me. I’m so grateful for everyone that has attended to me, prayed for me, and supported me. All this fills me with gratitude for and confidence in the personal involvement of kind, compassionate and loving Father in Heaven, who clearly needs me to do more than I have done during my first 42 years. I give Him all the credit and am resolved to strengthen my own personal efforts to show my gratitude by serving His other sons and daughters, my brothers and sisters, here on the earth for whatever time remains.

It’s a humbling thing to be a walking miracle. I think I understand, perhaps a little bit better, how Lazarus must have felt.