Author: Steve

  I forgot to take the selfie today!  John and Jo Shaffer brought us lunch (Wahoo Fish Taco.  Maui Bowl.  Yum.) and stayed for a nice long visit.  Then we headed for Louisville and an appointment for Judy with Dr Becky, who has been our physician for twenty years!  Another nice long visit.  Then we got to attend Becky’s birthday dinner, and she didn’t have to cook at all.  Brian grilled the steak.  Teigan made the twice baked potatoes and fruit salad.  Yesterday Teigan and Conner worked together to create the French silk pie for desert!   Another wonderful day!  

  We drove south to Denver.  That’s my first trip to the office this year.  Somehow it just didn’t fit the schedule before now.  In fact, the day of my trip to the cath lab, Judy and I, and Becky, missed the annual lunch sponsored by Gary, the guy in the middle.  He has his own accounting practice in the building, but is such a friend of the firm, he takes us all out to lunch in June every year.   We didn’t get to see everyone in Denver this trip.  It’s not often we find everyone in the same place at the same time.  Some of them are out on jobs.  Some are in Durango.  Some in Albuquerque.  We just take what we can get wherever we are.   And I remembered to take a selfie.   We love these people.  

  I listen to my heart beat.   It’s different now; and it’s not exactly a soothing sensation.  My mind’s eye sees an old four-cylinder jalopy inside me chugging along at a rough idle.  The whole chassis is rocking to the beat.  I feel like my whole body is rocking along with it.   It’s not that I think anything is wrong.  Maybe this is just what it sounds like when a heart is beating at full strength, after having been quiet for a few months.  Maybe this is, like wearing your underwear on the outside of your clothes, what it feels like when your arteries, and all that blood pumping through them, are now on the outside of your heart.    

  Judy tells me at one time I had an IV bag draining into a port on my left arm and six bags draining directly into ports in my jugular.  This clip pretty much sums up my week!   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wazTC2nmlBI   (Danger, it’s a little profane.)   Oh, and an addition to our menagerie;   a kind gift and a nice long visit with Todd Reade.  Some of you may remember Todd as an integral part of our extended family in Colorado in the 70s and 80s.  

  The elk encounter was the week BEFORE heart surgery.  I just didn’t get it written up until after.  I’m out and about, but not so out and about that it’s time to go wrestle wild elk yet.   I did not invade her personal space, but she certainly invaded mine.   If only I’d thought to turn and take a selfie when our faces and flaring nostrils were eighteen inches apart.  That would have been best selfie ever!