and play, yours was a warning, so behave…my lucky ones. The medical society has grouped us into 4 classes, all written in roman numerals for some odd reason. Class IV, my class, well, I guess you could say the guardian angel was out having a smoke when the reaper came to visit that day. His scythe left us scarred and breathless, forever married to endless tests, doctors, medications and a whole shopping list of worries. We are the bearers of strange devices that keep us going, our invisible guardian angel now has some mechanical help. In my opinion we are the strong ones, because no matter how hard it hurts, we keep that smile going. No matter how out of breath we get, we manage to climb that set of stairs. We keep going despite the odds, we are hopeful and we are determined to beat the reaper.
There’s no reason for me to go through the basics, we have all arrived here, many through no fault of our own and we are struggling to understand the best way to proceed, to improve, to breathe and to do those little things we took for granted before. A simple walk never became such a daunting task. I’m going on 3 years now, have had 3 different defibrillators/pacemakers and hospitalized 7 separate times just for heart operations. I feel like I have the right to comment, I’ve earned it, my ticking badge may be internal, but the scars I bear are very visible on the outside.
It took me almost 6 months to learn that I had congestive heart failure. For some odd reason I was only told that I had a massive heart attack and should look for a new vocation. None of my questions were really answered; everything was cloaked in some mysterious shroud, the disease that couldn’t be mentioned to me. My