On New Year’s Day, my friend Randy Roberts and I put on white hazmat suits and went out to shoot snow geese. We were told that the birds regard a human in a white suit as one of their own and they let you walk freely among them, something hunters supposedly discovered a while back. […]
I spent about seven hours in the operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital being worked on by a highly skilled surgical team, followed by a day in intensive care and five days in regular care. I also had a battery of pre-op and post-op tests and consultations to investigate the aortic aneurysm that put me […]
In early February this year, a few days after a magnetic resonance image confirmed that an aneurysm at the root of my aorta had reached a worrisome size, I received a phone call from the office of my primary care physician. The MRI had picked up an “incidental” finding, unrelated to the aneurysm; could I […]
Six weeks after intricate surgery to replace an aneurysm at the juncture of my heart and aorta with a polyester graft, I’m almost back to normal. I’m walking a lot, about to start biking again, and I’m well on my way to a complete recovery. But there is still a nagging question: Does my family […]
My wife Anne and I arrived at Johns Hopkins’s gleaming new Sheikh Zayed Tower at 5:15 AM on September 8. I knew I would soon be on an operating table with my breastbone split and my ribcage cranked open, exposing my heart and the aortic aneurysm that had brought me here. A heart-lung machine would […]
This is the third post in Affair of the Heart, a series that takes place at the intersection of a highly-experienced science writer and the medical system. by Colin Norman When my aortic aneurysm could no longer be ignored, and my cardiologist recommended a consultation with a specialist, I finally began to act like a science journalist. […]
This is the second post in Affair of the Heart, a series that takes place at the intersection of a highly-experienced science writer and the medical system. A few months after my brother almost died from an aortic dissection, when his aorta began to break down right where it emerges from the heart, I was […]
Affair of the Heart: I. A Brush with Death This is the last post in the series, Off Our Meds, in which LWON examined some scary issues in medicine but didn’t resort to fear mongering because we didn’t have to, medicine being scary enough as it is. This is also the first post in […]