Not long after the previous post here last October I had a mild heart attack while on my daily walk. I made it back to the house (I was about half a mile away when it began to be really painful) and eventually wound up in the hospital in Keene, NH. They sent me up to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic in Lebanon, where I had a heart catheterization, which showed a serious blockage in three of my coronary arteries. A bypass operation was scheduled for the following day. Unfortunately I didn't make it to the next day, suffering a massive coronary that night.* A bit of advice: if you're going to have a near-fatal heart attack, do it in the cardiac ward of one of the best hospitals on the East Coast. According to my surgeon, by the time they got me onto the operating table in the early hours of the morning, I had no blood pressure at all. Somehow they managed to pull me through during many hours on the heart-lung machine (the doctors called it "our big save") and after a couple of days in intensive care, I was allowed out into intermediate care, and not too long after that, was allowed to go home and start a long and painful recovery period.
The moral is this: chest pain is not to be ignored. Had I just ignored the pain (it went away after half an hour or so) I would have died last October during that second heart attack. Sobering thought!

So now, four months later, I'm having my cataracts done. After open heart surgery, what's to fear about someone coming at your eyeballs with a scalpel? I had the right eye done last Tuesday and they're doing the left one day after tomorrow. The procedure is simple: they make an incision in your eyeball, remove the cloudy lens, and replace it with a plastic one that turns you from a near-sighted person into a far-sighted person. I can now see clearly from about six feet to infinity with my unaided right eye. Having one far-sighted and one near-sighted eye does not make for a pleasant time, however. The left, untreated, eye is my dominant eye (yes, I'm a leftie) and it keeps trying to take over, making things sharp - blurry - sharp - blurry
ad nauseam. Literally. But the difference between the two is amazing. It's as though they had removed a dirty, brown film from my right eye. Everything is bright, colors sparkle, and I can see things clearly without glasses for the first time in 60 years!

*As I lapsed into unconsciousness, aware that this was the big one, I could hear the nurses saying all kinds of ER chatter like "get him intubated", and "stay with us, Ed", etc. But all I could think of was that I should say some last words, something for my loved ones to remember me by. Couldn't think of any. Later, when I was back among the living and surrounded by loving family members, I lamented my inability to think up some meaningful and concise final words. Daughter-in-law Andrea suggested "the murderer was....arrgh". Someone else came up with "the money is hidden in the....arrgh." I felt they were not really getting into the spirit of the thing.