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If you're reading this, it's a beautiful Friday morning and I'm in the hospital getting better.
Let me tell the story as quick as I can.
Last week I was having my heart looked at as part of a routine physical in preparation for going up to Boston next month. (In case you haven't heard, my wife and I are doing a fellowship at Harvard University. No, I can't believe it either.)
So they're doing an ultrasound or a sonogram or whatever it is on my chest, looking at my heart, and the technician sees a little white spot. He calls one doctor, who calls another doctor, who sends me for another test on Monday, and this is what they found:
There's a small tumor inside my heart.
You're not going to believe this, but it has nothing to do with me being a fat guy. I've got low cholesterol, low blood pressure, all that stuff. This tumor – it's called an atrial myxoma, Google it sometime – is almost always benign. It shows up for no good reason in a very small number of people. One of the studies I found says the number is about 75 in a million.
Mama always said I was special.
Right now the tumor isn't causing any harm. It's about an inch around, bobbing up and down in my left atrium, attached to my septum (the wall between the chambers) on a little stalk, like one of those lollipops they used to give away at the bank.
Problem is, if it breaks loose or a piece of it gets into my bloodstream, it could cause a stroke or worse. So they have to get it out of there. And the only way to get it out is open-heart surgery. Which is a phrase you never look forward to hearing.
I'm writing this before the surgery. By the time you read it, they'll have sewed me up already – the operation was scheduled for Thursday morning. Apparently, as open heart surgery goes, this is pretty straightforward – reach in there, snip the sucker out. If all goes well, I'll be in the hospital only about a week. Then comes a couple of weeks of resting at home while somebody peels me grapes and such. (Surprisingly, my wife has yet to volunteer for this.) Believe it or not, the doctors say I should be back to normal (so to speak) within 3-4 weeks, and should be able to get up to Boston just fine. Despite what people who know me might think, I am NOT having open-heart surgery just so I can get out of packing our stuff for the move. Although it is a great excuse.
I had planned to work this week and next before we headed north, but it looks like this might be my last column for a while. We'll be gone until next June sometime. So let me say a couple of things now that I had planned to say later.
I love this city. We have the problems every other big city has, and we create some of our own because of hardheadedness. But we're still a city on the rise, not tired and jaded.
I love this newspaper. It drives me crazy sometimes; and if my e-mail is any indication, it does the same to a lot of you. But you'll never get a better deal than the paper for 50 cents a day. Less if you subscribe. Free if you go online.
I love readers who care, even if we disagree. I love walking to the stadium on a football Sunday, and the smell of Nova's Bakery late at night, and the crape myrtles in bloom, and the drive over the Lake Wylie bridge, and the owls in the trees at night, and the chicken at Greek Isles, and way too many other things to list – but most of all, the friends we've made.
They couldn't get all that out of my heart if they tried. It'll still be there when we come back home. Talk to you then.
