On February 25th of this year, I was watching my nephews for the day, and my brother-in-law had just gotten home from work. My chest started hurting, and it was a slow pain at first that became quickly worse. My brother-in-law called 911 as he thought I was having a heart atttack. The ambulance came and took me to the hospital. Once I arrived at the hospital I felt OK, but they did tests for 6 hours and found nothing wrong with me. They decided on one last test, a CAT scan, to check my main aorta since the attack I had described the same symptoms as a torn aorta. Within an hour after my scan, I was on my way to emergency open heart surgery.
From the CAT scan it looked like my aorta had a tear above the heart and the blood was starting to pool.The surgeon assembled a team since this has to be fixed quickly. If it tears completely, an aneurysm, it is fatal. But once they got in there they found that my thymus gland had horseshoed itself around my aorta and it had started bleeding against the aorta wall. My body was mimicked into thnking my aorta was tearing and that sent me into the painful attack. They removed most of the thymus gland, kept the rest and stopped the bleeding, and closed me back up.
When they were in surgery they did an ultrasound on my heart and aorta to make sure it all was okay, and everything was 100% normal. They don't know why my thymus gland horseshoed around the aorta and started bleeding. There are only 3-4 other cases known of this happening. So it's kind of a rare thing.
So I have 6-8 weeks for my sternum bone to heal back up before I can do much of anything. I can't drive, can't workout, can't play paintball, I can only walk. After the 6-8 weeks for the bone to heal, I will slowly be allowed to do more things, but it's 6-9 months for me to fully recover before I can get back to playing paintball.
So its now March 28th over a month later, I am doing excellent, each week I am getting stronger and faster (walking), and today for the first time since my surgery I went to the gym and did the recumbent bike for 3 miles at 28:45ish, a little slow compared to life before surgery, but still I rode non-stop for the entire time. I did up my carb intake while I am healing, to like 30-40 carbs per day. But good news is I am still losing weight lost another 2 pounds again this week (unofficially) So over 77 pounds lost (unofficially).
And I am still going strong.
