In the summer of 2012 I finally
felt crappy enough that I went to see a doctor.
Turns out that it was a pretty good decision. I rattled off a list of things that I wanted
to bring to his attention as long as I was there. After listening, he said “Yeah, that’s all
good stuff but let’s focus on the chest pains, eh?” Another good decision and the start of my education
about cardiac health. This was the
beginning of what seemed like endless visits to doctors and thousands of
tests. Each of which seemed to bring
more surprise to the medical staff than the ones before. Turns out that the general feeling of discomfort
and low energy was due to the fact that most of the arteries supplying blood to
my heart were nearly completely blocked.
This I learned on the day of my cardiac catheterization, a day I thought
marked the bottom of the slide and the start of the improvement. It turned out to be only the precursor to the
big downhill slide and the mark of a much longer uphill to improvement. What I thought would be an outpatient
procedure to take an up close look at my heart and insert a stent that my
cardiologist (because I now had one of those) was pretty sure would “make me
feel 100% better almost immediately” turned into the day that I found out I
would need open heart surgery. Quite a
day.
A short while later I found myself
with a cardiac surgeon showing him the images of my heart and explaining that
the cardiologist had noted that I would need 5 bypasses. He looked at the images and replied “Nope,
you need six and you are probably a couple of days or weeks away from a massive
heart attack.” Not something you ever
really expect to hear. Days after my 42nd
birthday I had surgery to re-route blood flow to 6 different arteries of my
heart (CABG X6 in medical parlance). To
the folks saying “I didn’t even know you
could have that many” I can assure you that it is possible though unusual,
especially for a non-smoker of my age with no family history of heart issues.
This closed the book on what had been my life so far and started my new journey
into the future.
Over the next several months my
full time task was recovering from surgery and continuing the overhaul of my
diet and daily life. I had now become a
fairly strict vegetarian as this was the pretty much the only option for
following a no cholesterol, low fat (zero trans fat), low to moderate
carbohydrate eating plan. While I really
don’t care for the political message often tied up with the term vegan, by the
time you take a vegetarian diet and remove cholesterol sources (egg yolks,
cheese, milk, etc.) you are pretty much left with a vegan diet. After a couple months of cardiac rehab I
entered a 5K run and managed to complete it (admittedly at a pokey pace)
without walking and decided I was ready focus my attention on a return to work.
Returning to work was the catalyst
to really solidify my understanding of how this experience had (and continued
to) change my priorities for my life. Part
of my process for preparing for surgery was to get all of my life and financial
affairs organized, summarized and prepared for communication to others. I now highly recommend this task to others
regardless of current health issues as a way to evaluate goals and priorities
versus how we are living our lives. What
I found was that as I contemplated whether or not I would have additional time
in my life to pursue goals, the goals that made it to the top of my list had
nothing to do with spending more time in an office, pursuing corporate
advancement, or accumulating more money.
My short list was long term focus on healthy living, spending more time
with my family, dedicating more time to activities for which I have developed a
passion, and no longer being hesitant to pursue goals for fear of a less than
ideal outcome. Added to this was a
strong sense of urgency. No longer was
the thought that there would always be time down the road something that I took
for certain. Perhaps there would be
plenty of time and perhaps not but I could no longer take it for granted. My return to work made it abundantly clear
that how I was living my life was not in line with my priorities.
During my preparation for surgery,
I spent some time on estate planning tasks to make things easier to find for
folks who may need to find such things.
After completing a summary of accounts and balances and finishing a
will, it became clear to me that it was comforting to know that I could leave
something for those who were important to me in my life. However, accumulating
more would not lead me to what was important to me. The resource that I needed to maximize was
time, or more specifically, control over the time that I have. That means making efforts to be sure that I
am spending my time in ways that are consistent with my priorities and goals. As I examined how I was spending my time
after I returned to work, it was clear that I was not living my life in a way
that was important to me.
Many things in my life now lined up
to make a major transition an easy path to choose. My needs are few, with no children of my own
I need only support myself and I have little use for a fancy lifestyle. I have been a rainy day saver and investor
for all of my working life and I have a strong desire to live a life with a
small material footprint. There seemed
to be no good reason that I could come up with for why I should not take this
time to change the direction of my life.
Except of course that nagging fear and it was beyond the time to put
that to rest. It sounds simple in principle
(and it is actually) but of course the challenge is in the execution. While I knew that this was what I needed to
do, it still took me several months to get to pull the trigger and leave my
job. So it was almost exactly a year
following my surgery that I found myself giving notice at my job and planning
to force myself into the next phase of my life.
This then begins the tale of the next phase of my life during which I plan to pursue things that are important to me and things that I have let concerns about the future prevent me from pursuing. I will now spend more time with my family, work through a list of things that I have been wanting to try; offshore sailing, distance bicycle touring, a career built around a passion, living a healthy lifestyle with minimal material impacts.
This then begins the tale of the next phase of my life during which I plan to pursue things that are important to me and things that I have let concerns about the future prevent me from pursuing. I will now spend more time with my family, work through a list of things that I have been wanting to try; offshore sailing, distance bicycle touring, a career built around a passion, living a healthy lifestyle with minimal material impacts.
