Brad's Heart

 Everything has honestly been perfect. As perfect as they can be anyway. I'd like to have my abs back, but it's fine. Brad's got the dream job with the dream coworkers and the dream schedule. He can literally go to work in his pajamas. I've loved having him home. We have always worked best, relationship wise, when we can be together all the time. It sounds weird, but it's true. I bring him coffee in the morning, he tells his coworkers how lucky he is to have me, brags to them about me all the time, we flirt, help each other, etc. Despite the fact that the rest of the world is basically a gigantic shitshow, we're at our happiest. We've found a good rhythm. I can finally work out again and the kids like "exercising" with me. :) Our dogs are the cutest. I have my dream house with a dream back yard and a massive garden that I love working in. The kids are happy. Hayden is a math whiz. Diana is almost reading without help. Noah is killing it with his therapists that come daily to work on life skills. If Brad and I can't fit in a date, we order (healthy-ish) takeout and watch Ted Lasso or a movie. So I'm not even lying that life has been so incredible this past little while. Until last week.

Thanks to Covid, Brad has been extra nervous to go to his heart doctor for a checkup. It just felt less risky to stay home than to go to a hospital during a pandemic. But something (ie. God) kept nagging at him, telling him that he was going to die soon if he didn't get his health checked out. He thought that meant Covid, so he booked an appointment with a cardiologist that was available asap. They said he was totally fine to get the vaccine and went ahead and hooked him up to his 24 hr monitor like always. He turned it in the next day. Last Thursday (two days after returning the monitor) right after Noah's favorite therapist Christy left, he got a phone call. They told him to get to the emergency room now, that he needed to have emergency heart surgery within the next 24 hours. Their exact words were "Tell your family you love them and get here immediately." Turns out that as he was sleeping, he was going into stage 3 heart block. It was definitely serious. He needed a pacemaker asap. After that phone call, Brad looked at me with tears in his eyes and told me the news. This man doesn't cry that easily. He was scared. 

When he was 19 and was sent home from his mission after 5 months, his cardiologist at the time (Dr Stern) thought he would need a pacemaker then. Thankfully they said it wasn't necessary yet and somehow we made it almost 20 years before needing one. Also that sentence just made me feel old. Lol. Anyway, we rushed around finding shoes and necessities to get him to the ER. Brad started talking about worst case scenarios... like if something happens to him to sell the house and move in with my dad for awhile. And that he should give me his work passwords to have access to his RUI's. I told him not to tell me any of that because he was coming back home. We both have been preparing for days like this for years. We immediately went into rational mode. 

Friday was surgery day. I couldn't sit still. The kids and I blasted positive Jesus music (their favorite is Maybe Midnight by TobyMac). I cleaned nonstop. The space under our kitchen sink hasn't been organized since we moved in, but you bet your butt it's perfect now. I got a phone call around 4pm finally that the surgery went well and he was in recovery. His nurse said he seemed to be a little upset at first, but he was doing well otherwise. Turns out he was upset because his initial OR nurse was the worst! She basically ignored him. Kerri and Kalyb came over so I could go to the hospital to be with him. It's surreal walking into a hospital not knowing if someone is accidentally infecting you with a deadly virus. But the super sweet, totally gay receptionist dude made my day and told me how young I look. :)

Poor Brad. He was all bandaged and medicated. We spent the evening eating crappy hospital turkey sandwiches and watching a Panthers game. He clearly needed me to stay the night, as he could hardly move his right side. As soon as he asked me to, my mind went straight to Hayden. My sweet sweet boy who gets so anxious so easily. I was so worried he would be sad I wasn't coming home after I told him I would. But Kalyb Facetimed us and they were having a BLAST pretending to be Pokemon and having him capture them. It was adorable. All of Brad's nurses were so nice, and of course he put on the charm and was their obvious favorite patient. 

Watching his reaction to seeing his surgery incision was pretty upsetting. He was blue, yellow, purple... all the colors you probably don't want to have in your skin. It was definitely a mental adjustment for the both of us. It just made me sad to see him so sad and vulnerable and in pain. We got a few hours of sleep that night. It definitely felt weird to be the one sleeping on the couch instead of the hospital bed for once! haha. We got him home and set up in the Lazy Boy chair he bought for a vasectomy he never got a couple years ago ("because the front desk people were incompetent, and if that's how their front desk is run, no way are they coming close to down there...." hahaha). 

The next couple of weeks were filled with lots of ice pack refills (which the kids, even Noah, helped with), movies, medicine, follow up appointments (btw, Greg Olsen is my freaking hero for what he did to Sanger's pediatric cardiology unit!! That place used to be a dark hole when we were in college!), board games, and just trying to keep Brad comfortable while he recovered. The only hiccup we had was about a week into recovery, he would start to fall asleep and get this weird jolt that would wake him up. We took him into the pacemaker company place and it turns out they needed to adjust some settings with how they wired him. What was happening was that as he started to doze off, his heart would slow down and the signal to keep his heart pumping was also getting sent to his right side. It was taking his breath away honestly. Thankfully they got it all fixed, and he's been fine since.

For me, it was an oddly comforting place to be. It's where I shine. I know how to take care of him. It's what I did when we were 19. I go to the appointments, I ask the questions, I make sure he takes the right meds, and I make sure he knows we love him... I'm good at it. It was nice to feel needed and appreciated. I like to feel useful and productive. I don't ever want to feel like a burden to anyone, so this for me was a way of showing I'm an asset I guess. 

Since then, he's recovered well. Hayden was totally freaked out by his surgery area at first. Noah was adorable and just took it in as fact. Diana was fascinated. She's hilariously wonderful. She and Hayden both loved helping.

I'm so incredibly grateful he's okay. Life basically got back to normal, and I can't even begin to say how thankful I am for the company he's with and the friends he has there. They all pulled together and ran things for a few weeks while he was out. They're seriously the best.