Life, Death, Checks and Balances

I am back to writing again and as I do, I actually feel better in my physical recovery than the past two times I have been on this ward after Heart Surgery and infectious disease. This past week has been the toughest of my life, not so much physically but emotionally. By some chance, I had a routine Echo cardiogram in Billings that revealed a severe Aortic aneurysm and infection in my bovine Heart valve replacement of 3 yrs ago. With no indication or symptoms of any kind, I was heading, as my surgeon Dr. McCarthy put it, to a "disaster." As many of my friends have said to me the past few days, the man upstairs isn't done with me yet.



I want to first thank all the well wishing folks out there that sent the Marschall/Keller family those wonderful thoughts and prayers to us during these trying days, we really appreciate it!

Having my Mom, Dad, my wife Sarah and my beautiful baby Cale here with me has been huge and of course my Chicago friends, Kevin, Dizzy, Carol, Mike H, Joanne, and so on is also such a help. oh and I miss my little girl Chloe so very much back in Billings(Thanks Christina and Todd and Maggie Vralsted for helping out so much)

The Medical teams here in Chicago are trying very hard to figure out answers to why, after a completely normal Echo last year post-illness, I now have a heart that went to shit! Cultures are being grown as we speak with the scrapped tissue they cut out to find out what kind of infection it was. So far, no definitive answers are in. I may be staying in Chicago for more than a week until they run all the tests and have a plan in place on how to treat and track me from now on. Some of the infectious disease team members are saying that this infection is probably different from last year's since there were no symptoms prior.



So now I sit here in the hospital working through it all. Last night I just couldn't get the thoughts of why, what, how, when, "the grim reaper thoughts" out of my head. Every time I would doze off, I would then slip into a strange dream followed by waking up seeing reports of death on the TV -- ie. Dennis Hopper or Gary Coleman -- constant thoughts of my heart exploding etc... very stressful and not good. My normal Coachjay response is to be pissed/mad/bitter and fight back -- however this time I think I will take a more balanced approach to dealing with this obstacle. There are so many incredible things left to do in my life but I need to be alive to do them. For now I will just wait and see what the doctors say is the next step, love my family and friends and thank God.

Thanks again for all your support.

Jay