It has been so long since I have taken time to maintain a blog that I find myself wondering just where to start. I suppose the best place to start is a brief recap of recent events.

These last few months have been...chaotic. In a nutshell the following events have shaped the last few months of my life:

• I found a wonderful woman who agreed to be my wife.
• I married this wonderful woman.
• I learned that I was going to be a father.
  
• I learned that the surgery I had hoped to avoid was finally necessary, and I underwent aortic valve replacement surgery.
• Ollie, my pet and constant companion of the last several years had to be put to sleep.

As you can see, there is a mix of both good and bad in all of this. I would love to focus on the one thing that is the primary focus of my life right now, but every one of these is a primary focus, so that option really isn't open. So instead I must choose one, and I suppose the surgery is as good a place as any to start.

I don't care how routine the doctors say heart surgery is, it is still major surgery, and it takes a lot out of the patient. I went to the hospital afraid that I wouldn't make it, or that I wouldn't be able to handle the pain. The greatest fear was that I would lose my life on the operating table, but when faced with certain death if I didn't have the surgery...well, surgery was the better option, and at least I had good insurance so the expense wouldn't be too bad.

For those who are not familiar with what happens, they have to literally crack open your ribcage to get to your heart. Ironically this is the most traumatic point for me. Sure they went in and replaced a heart valve with an artificial valve, but that actually heals fairly quickly in the grand scheme of things. Waiting for my ribcage to heal is another matter, and is a constant source of pain in my life right now. Simple things like being able to sleep on my stomach are impossible right now. Correction, I could certainly try sleeping on my stomach, but the pain from compressing my ribcage would certainly convince me that it isn't the best idea. Waiting for the bones to heal is...frustrating, and is the primary limiter on what I can do on a daily basis.

They tell you long before the surgery that you will tire easily, and will be weak while recovering. What they downplay is just how weak you will be, and how easily you will tire. Here I am, 7 weeks after the surgery, and a 4 hour work day sitting in front of a computer exhausts me. Me! The person who could put in a 10+ hour day at work, and then come home and play computer games for a few more hours. Now I find that after 4 hours at work I need a nap, and most of the time the last thing I want to do is play a game or even sit at the computer.

Even the littlest things like talking to a friend on the phone can be taxing!

The good news is that while tiring, the more I do the better I feel. It is rather like going to the gym and starting to work out on a regular basis, just on a far smaller scale. Those first few times you are so exhausted that you can't imagine doing it again, but you go ahead and try again. Eventually it becomes routine, and you aren't as tired as you were to start. Better, you find that you can do more, and the more you do the more you find you can do. The same applies here, but in a more limited sense.

So what do I do? I try to do more. I try to not sit at my desk all the time I am at the office, and make it a point to get up and walk about at least once an hour. Sure I could call my co-workers halfway across the building to see how they are doing on something that they have been helping me with, or I could email them, but instead I get to me feet and walk over. This gets me some much needed exercise, and it is exercise at a level that I can handle at this point in my recovery. It also lets me spend some face to face time with the people I work with, and I find that if they talk to me face to face they are more energetic about finishing the task.

I still tire easily, but I am happy to find that I can do more without getting tired as fast, and I have dreams of being able to get out in the woods and going for multi-mile hikes again as the weather gets nicer. I miss being able to do that, and now I have somebody to enjoy those hikes with me. Sure, we can't tackle some of the more difficult hikes now that she is pregnant, but there are plenty of low impact trails that we can hike, and this is the perfect country for a wide variety of hiking options, even within the city.

Speaking of tiring easily...it seems that I have reached that point. My wife has already gone to bed, and I am thinking that perhaps I should follow her...