The Lord has blessed me with a good bit of longevity. I recently passed 85 years on this planet. In the next few lines I’ll share with you some words you never want to hear, but may very well experience, like I did.
1. From your cardiologist looking at a screen showing how your heart is performing. “Sheeit!!”
Apparently, my heart rate was off the chart fast and blood pressure off the chart low.
When I looked up from my bed in Roper Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and saw both Dr Rieder and Dr Baker, fear was not an emotion I experienced. They were the “best in the business”, I thought.
I may say this wrong medically. I never even played a doctor on TV. But they purposely killed two nodes of my heart that were not working and transferred that workload to my, already in place, pacemaker/defibrillator. That wonderful piece of machinery is actively controlling my heart rate now. Ain’t that amazing? I am truly living better electrically.

2. From your teenage or even adult offspring on your phone. “Uh, Dad”. Any call that opens with those two dreaded words is almost sure to be bad news.
From the not too bad “I put a dent in the car,“ to the horrible, “our daughter (your granddaughter) just had a bad accident and is in critical care at the hospital,” to the laugh provoking, “My teenage son won’t talk to me“ from your eldest daughter–the same daughter who didn’t say more than 10 words to you and her mother for a year in high school. Parenthood is forever, but grand parenthood allows you to get even.
3. From your wife, Marjorie, in another room of your condo, after you hear a dull thud, “Don, I fell.” Her voice was very calm.
She has very little upper body strength and had fallen to the floor on her face.
She had multiple bruises on her face and a slight cut above her eye. I drove her to the downtown Roper Hospital ER. She did complain of a slight discomfort in her neck.
After taking an X ray of her neck area, they rushed into her holding room, put a neck brace on her and started an IV. She had fractured the C2 vertebrae in the upper part of he neck. They call that “the hangman’s vertebrae”.
In summary, the outstanding neurosurgeon at Roper St Francis, Dr Bailey, placed a two-inch platinum screw in the odontoid bone of her neck, and saved her life. That incident was about 11 years ago and she’s still doing fine. Enuf for now.