Gary's Journal

It’s strange how quickly life starts back up after something major.
A few months ago surgeons opened my chest, put me on a bypass machine, stopped my heart, replaced my aortic valve, repaired my mitral valve, removed part of the septal wall inside my heart, and put me back together again.

And now here I am back in meetings, answering Teams messages, grilling supper, and sitting in traffic on I-77 like nothing unusual happened.
That’s honestly hard to reconcile sometimes.
The odd thing is that I understand exactly what happened medically. I’ve watched the surgery videos. Read the explanations. Asked the questions. I remember enough from those first days afterward to know it was a really big deal.
But I still don’t think I’ve fully processed it.
And I’m not sure processing something like this even means having some big emotional breakthrough. I think maybe part of me is still just trying to emotionally catch up to something my intellect already understands.
This surgery didn’t suddenly teach me that life is fragile. Other experiences in my life — including brain surgery a few years ago — already taught me that pretty clearly.
So this feels like something different.
Maybe during recovery your brain narrows its focus just to get through each day:
walk,
heal,
sleep,
breathe,
get stronger.
And maybe that’s necessary for a while.
But eventually normal life starts moving again and you find yourself sitting quietly somewhere thinking: “Wait… what exactly did I just go through?”
Some days I barely think about the surgery at all. Other days I’ll absentmindedly rub the scar on my chest during a meeting and suddenly remember my heart was literally stopped for a while.
That’s a strange thing to carry around in your head.
Writing about it seems to help some. Maybe because writing pulls thoughts out into the open instead of letting them just float around half-processed in the background.
But honestly, I think some experiences probably need conversation too. Not advice necessarily. Not someone trying to turn it into a life lesson or explain it away. Just someone willing to acknowledge it was a really big thing.
Spiritually, I don’t think this surgery suddenly changed my beliefs or gave me some brand new outlook on life. But it has reminded me again how little control I actually have.
During that surgery I was completely unconscious and entirely in the hands of other people — and ultimately in the hands of God.
And the truth is, that’s always been the case whether I acknowledged it or not.
Maybe processing something like this is eventually being able to honestly say: “Yes. That happened to me. It was enormous. And it is now part of my life story.”
God knows. Trust.