Bruce's Heart Attack

April 17, 2010 - My husband had a heart attack on this day. It's now July 26th as I write this. Both of our lives have changed in ways I never would have imagined. Bruce had a horrific heart attack - a LAD, which the doctor told us they described as a "widowmaker" due to fact that the whole back of his heart supplied by that artery dies and most times, so does the individual.

So we were blessed....not lucky, but most assuredly blessed.

Bruce has been through 5 different procedures including having a defibrillator installed to shock his heart back should it be needed. It also has a pacemaker which his heart is not in need of at this time. He has had fluid drawn off his heart twice, once with a needle and the other with a surgical pericardial window. 600cc of fluid drawn off his heart each time. He also has had 2 separate angiograms, and once they left the leads in his heart for 5 days to monitor the amount of fluid he was building up.

Bruce was in the hospital for 6 weeks total, off and on. Three of those weeks in ICU.

I'm sure you get the picture, he was a very sick man and we didn't know if he would survive.

So we are blessed, he is alive and doing well. I am most grateful.

One of the things that I realized most about this experience is that when God brings you through a traumatic incident like this - he doesn't intend for you to go back to living life the way you did before.  I am trying to use this experience, learn from it, incorporate the things we've learned into our lives - and to live a changed life.

So here we are. Living a changed life. 

Letting go. That's what we are doing. Letting go of the plans we had for our lives - and turning to God and asking Him to lead us. Where next? What next?  

This is so much harder than anything I have ever gone through before. And the biggest lesson I have learned is one that I already knew - just on a completely new level. ....

We are not running the show. We are not in control.  

Our job is to trust God even when we don't know what's in store for tomorrow. 

Not an easy task.