August 18th Update So it’s been just over one weeks since being released from my 7 week stay in the hospital. Things are going very well in my healing process although I had to go back to the ER on Sunday morning because I was experiencing a lot of pain in my chest and had major chronic diarrhea. (yeah maybe it’s more information shared than necessary but I have to keep it real… lol). I ended up going to the ER in the new Zuckerberg SF General Hospital since it’s really close to my home. Beautiful and as modern as it is, I won’t ever go there again

by choice. I should have stuck with where I knew I would be treated with my full history intact, but all in all being there I was set back on the track. It turned out that I was release from the hospital last week without the full medicine regimen that I should have been on and I knew this when I started to fill my own pill box for the week. I was given subpar treatment for the pericarditis, which is swelling around the heart, which caused the pressure to push out on my ribs on my left side. This happened on Saturday night as I couldn’t lie flat without extreme pain on my ribs and I didn’t get any sleep that night. It felt like I was being stabbed with a sharp knife. So when I went to the ER in the morning they assessed me and managed my pain as best they could and then told me that I would be admitted for an overnight stay. At first I just thought, “Please God not again!” but even thought I was not happy about it as I had barely had the chance to be home for a few days I knew I needed to be taken care of.

By Monday midday once I got on the right medications and enough time past for the meds to do it’s thing and the pain started to subside. I asked what the plan was for my release but since they had not heard back form my surgeon they couldn’t give me an answer. I convinced them that I take good care of myself and religiously stick to my medical regimen and that I really didn’t want to stay in the hospital another night. The attending physician agreed that it would be agreeable to discharge and started the process rolling. To be quite honest I just did not enjoy being there. At UCSF Medical Center all the nurses were great! The food at UCSF was 1000 times ahead of anything I could have imagined for hospital food. They have a full menu, which for some reason reminded me of Denny’s extensive menu. At Zuckerberg Hospital you didn’t get to make ‘any choices’, you get what you get. When I was being screened for admittance I told them I was Pescatarian, which they really didn’t know what that was (Fish and vegetarian diet). I was given a dry egg and dry hashbrown breakfast , a chicken dish for lunch and then Meatloaf for dinner. Not good. Luckily friends brought me sandwiches and I had dinner when I was released from the hospital Monday night. In my final few hours of my stay my cardiac surgeon came and saw me. He had three first year med students with him. He wanted them to listen to my heart since it was a good chance for them to hear first hand what a mechanical valve sounded like. He also told them that I was a great patient, that I was an over the top, in great health fitness coach and that my dietary lifestyle too was over the top which has been a tremendous help getting me through the delicate and severe health issue prompting the need for the open heart surgery. It was humbling for sure and with that it made my stay at Zuckergerg General Hospital worth the experience helping, once again, plant a seed of realness for the new med students to realize that with each case there is an individual and that they need to be treated as such. Gods amazing power at work again!

So I was sent home to continue my healing. I have a nurse coming every other day to help me with my IV home infusion. It’s a 24/7 ordeal which is just like toting my love/hate relationship with my IV pole in the hospital, although I have a lot more freedom with my big ass fanny pack mobile mini pump and medicine bag. I tend to forget I have it and it pulls me back when I’ve reached the end of my tether. Things could be worse but I only have to live with this until September 13th which then I’ll be off all antibiotics, and hopefully get my bowels back on track, again keeping it real… hehe. Anyway, I am home again. The construction of the new apartment building outside our living room window hasn’t been so bad this past week but as they prepare for the first floor of apartments I’m certain that we will be having a lot of hammering and other noise sooner than later. With the dust and noise swirling around I would keep the windows closed but with our west facing windows it gets fairly hot in our 411sqft apartment.

With the sawing and dust flying around we can’t have the windows open, which sucks big time. So I am praying that that part stays low key as I’m using this downtime to finish studying for my Sports Nutrition certification and to keep using my meditation/healing ritual for a full and speedy recovery. With that being said I need to listen to my body and be mindful that it needs the time to fully go through the healing process. It’s easy for my mind to make me want to just run forward but I obviously need to walk before I can run. It is also a bummer that this whole experience will bring me to being out of work for nearly ½ a year really makes it difficult to just sit back to heal, but as I mentioned in a previous post my friends and family have been there for me in the past as has my faith in God that really makes me stay calm and centered. On that note I want to share the fundraiser page that my dear friend David Aguilar created on "GoFundMe.com" that was put together so that those of you who are able, or are moved to assist Brett and I financially over the course of my health challenge as I have not been able to work and still have 3 months for recovery where I might possibly go back to work part-time in a couple months and the stress is not here yet but by beginning of September it's going to look challenging. It's humbling to be in this position in this unforeseen situation, but again I am grateful to all of you for the love and support over the past 2 ½ month with your well wishes and prayers and contributions to the GoFundMe and the fundraiser that my colleagues at work held for me last month, so thank you again! https://www.gofundme.com/2innmvw So dear friends I end this post with this personal thought, “You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friends nose”. I don’t know why that came to my mind to share but in that there must be some hidden wisdom… lol. I'm glad we picked each other!.

Until next time may God bless your every moment and may all the Love and Light of the Universe surround you always! XOXO, Jesse

August 10th - Week 7 Update Well another week gone by and sorry for my absence. There was no news to report for week five except that I was starting to get totally bored! I was starting to get stir crazy so I just read and tried to focus on logistics of finances having not worked for since June 10. I’m not worried at all about that as I know having been through this before that God, and the help of my friends will help me get through this.

It all seemed to being going well as I was being assessed to be able to finish out week 6 of IV antibiotics at home, but then I suddenly had an episode on Saturday night with severe pain in my abdomen and head just as I had experienced 7 weeks prior in Grass Valley when I had to be taken to the emergency room there. I was taken to have an CAT Scan right away and they found an aneurysm had developed near the infection site and it posed a danger of rupturing so they schedule me for surgery as soon as my surgeon was prepared to move forward so we planned for Monday morning August 1. As much as I had hoped to avoid surgery, the main goal of spending all this time in the hospital was to get my body in optimal health and that I was. Sunday was spent resting as I was already taking heavy pain medication and the IV protocol. Close friends and family visited me that Sunday but I wasn’t much of a host as I mostly slept. This was all just surreal going through the whole open-heart surgery once again. But prepared I was! I just kept saying my prayers and mantras to continue the healing energy for my body and my mind. I have to say that the mental preparation could not be any more important than the physical preparation! It was going to be a test of strength to be sure. I was rolled into the operating room at 7:30AM. What is usually a 5-hour aortic valve replacement and ascending aorta repair operation ended up being an 11-hour event. All in all it was a successful operation and my Doctor was very pleased with the results. Apparently the 11-hour operation was because of the aggressive strain of staph bacteria and the location of the infection that my cardiac surgeon had to make sure that all of the infection was completely removed. What that entailed was basically replacing the infected parts of my heart and plumbing and then irrigating my entire exposed organ system within my chest cavity with antibiotics to make sure that all of the infection was cleared. When I woke up in the ICU it was 11:30 PM. I knew I was in the hospital, I knew I’d had open-heart surgery, I knew that the real test was just beginning, recovery! I was still on ventilation when I woke up so the time had come for the breathing tube to be removed from my throat and when doing so the nurses urged me to breathe. But I couldn’t breathe for the mucous had accumulated at the bottom of the entry way to my trachea. They kept urging me to “Breathe, breathe, breathe, just breather”. I felt like I was downing. They started to lie me back down into my bed. It only made it worse. At that moment I could imagine what my brother Joe must have felt with pulmonary fibrosis. I began to panic. I grabbed the arm of the attending nurse and had him stop lying me back. You’ve got to breathe they’d say. I motioned that I couldn’t breathe. The time was ticking and I knew it. “How long could I hold my breath”, I wondered. I motioned again that I couldn’t breathe. I tried to talk, “Suction”. “What?”, the nurse asked. I made my self keep calm because if I didn’t I new I could die. I pulled it together and was barely able to udder the words to the male nurse, “I need suction”. They gave me the suction tube and put it into the back of my throat and coughed as best I could and a rush mucous cleared my throat. I began to breathe calmly. I don’t know that I have ever been through anything so scary in all my life!

Now comes the pain, my ribs felt like someone had sucker punched me a thousand times on each side plus being hit by a truck compounded with the trauma of already dealing with the infection in my body for the past 8 weeks prior to surgery date. They’d given me what they thought was a heavy dose of pain medications. I knew that I should have emphasized more clearly to the anesthesiologist before hand that I had a high tolerance to pain medication and to not hold back. I had to fight tooth and nail with my stone cold ICU nurse to get the high dosages of pain medication. It told her that each patient should be looked at as individuals and not regular textbook scenarios. Ugh, her we go again having to explain myself. It took 12 hours to get the pain to a manageable level. For the next 2 days they gradually increased the levels of pain medications so that they were in “therapeutic range”. So by Wednesday I started to get relief and being heavily medicated I was able to get some sleep at night but then by Thursday evening I started to difficulty sleeping for any stretch of time beyond an hour. This made me realize that I was on track to recovery, as my normal reaction is not having a normal sleep pattern.

The adventure continues. First of all I had been moved to 3 different rooms in the past week and I was getting a little disorientated. First I had my own room in the ICU for 2 days, and then I was moved to a shared room in ECCU, Extended Cardiac Care Unit. I had a roommate who was mad at the world. He must have been because he kept yelling at everyone who would come into the room. Fortunately for me my hearing really sucks, and I was exhausted, so it seemed easy to tune him out but it also took my meditation focus to the next level of consciousness. I had to block out the outside world to really focus on myself. It was a challenge I was up to but I still asked the nurse if I could have a private room, which I ended up getting the next day, day 5. So I was moved to the opposite side of the hospital wing and was put into a room that must have been an afterthought when putting it together because it was so tight to maneuver around with my IV pole, which went with me everywhere I had to go, but it didn’t matter I was a private room. All the while that I’ve been in the hospital orders were that I take walks periodically throughout the day, as this seems to be a prerequisite to being discharge from the hospital they want to make sure that you can manage under you own control. In the ICU I walked the day after surgery and again the second day. I was a walking fool, as I wanted to get better and feel ready for discharge from the hospital on day 10. Back to day 5, Friday, I got a private room. I’d taken three walks already and kept getting turned around. I had visitor that day and even they got confused on which way was what. At one point I ended up walking into my old room where someone was lying in the bed. Awkward! Now that I was feeling more in control of the pain and getting back to myself my old pattern of sleeplessness I asked for sleep aid. Ambien or trazadone was all they had to offer in the hospital. I chose the Ambien, which apparently made me a bit loopy. My nurse was giving me my nighttime dose of medications and I was making light with my nurse as we went for my walk. She didn’t seem amused and was already looking at me suspiciously. She was a very good nurse making sure I had everything I needed to assure I was comfortable. It came time for my last walk of the day. I was blabbing away with my nurse on my Ambien high and she would answer my questions which I assume maybe were too silly by the look on her face. We turned a corner and as I was feeling that I had enough of a walk I asked the wrong question, “Where are we going?” “Well we just pasted your room” she said. I relied, “I got so confused.” “You’re confused? It’s not good that you’re confused!” I was in trouble. I explained that I got turned around earlier that day when I was walking a visitor to the guest elevator. She wasn’t buying it. She really was worried. Around midnight I was told I that I was being moved immediately to a different room. I asked why but they wouldn’t say. I really didn’t care at that point as I was in la la land. I got up to help pack up my things as I had actually moved into the hospital with food, books, computer, iPad, and other things that made my 6 weeks stay more comfortable. “All you need to do is to stay in your bed”, my nurse told me. I had no control of what was happening. It really made me uncomfortable as I felt like I was being treated like I was going to hurt someone because all because I had taken Ambien. She kept asking me if I was okay. She actually ended up staying in my room keeping watch over me the whole night through. I got a bit creeped out! When I asked the next morning after shift change I was told that it was because of concern of me falling during the night. I have to admit that I was talking to people who weren’t there. I had my eyes closed and could see people in my room, friends mostly, and would have conversations with them but then when I opened my eyes the room was empty. Needless to say it took a couple days to get the Ambien out of my system as I was still talking to people in my lucid sleep only to open my eyes and no one was in my room. Freaky!

I’m feeling better and am scheduled to be discharged today, Wednesday August 10. It has been a rollercoaster of a health ride to say the least! My doctor reminded me of how dire the situation was when I arrived at the hospital 7 weeks ago and that’s not to mention the two weeks before that when it all started. It was like being in a truck accident, which put it all in perspective. Why don’t they tell you this before the operation? Well I guess if someone can imagine being hit by a truck and how intense the recovery process was going to be they might not go through with the operation! I have to say thanks again for all the prayers, positive vibes, positive energy, words of comfort and just being there for support. Thanks for those of you who were able to come to visit me in the hospital breaking up the monotony of monotony, for those gifts of food, chocolates, deserts, and magazines. It all helped, believe me! I’ll update you again as I settle back to being in my own home again! I know that with continued prayers I will be back doing things that I love, like writing and coloring, and creating workout programs for my clients! In the meantime wishes for good health to all of you and continued Love, Light, Peace, and Harmony to each and every one of you near and far. God bless you always! XOXO, Jesse