It’s a hard thing knowing that you’ve crossed the line between your mortality being something amorphous, vaguely present, but hard to define, and the moment that you learn that it is most definitely finite.  I’ve cross that line.  I am going to die.

On Christmas morning, I suffered heart failure at my mother’s house in Hagerstown, MD.  My lungs were clouded with fluid, my heart too weak to pump it off.  That problem was taken care of with medicine, but I was transported  home to Washington, D.C.’s Washington Hospital Center for further testing and evaluation.

It turns out that I have an extremely weak heart — probably have had one my whole life.  The question is not if it will give out, but when and how.  I’m on medication to help regulate it, but if it doesn’t work, I will be given a defibrillator implant to make sure that if my heart stops, it will resume.  I will also be placed on a transplant list for a new heart.

It is very hard for me to type these words, to accept them.  Just two weeks ago, I was a 34-year-old man with a chronic cough.  Now I’m a man who could die tomorrow, today, in a minute.  It’s hard to even bring these thoughts into my head — but they’re true.  Now I have to learn to accept them.

I have panic attacks — and the only thing that makes me feel better is anti-anxiety medicine.  I am afraid to get up and a walk around — is what I’m feeling a cardiac event or anxiety?  

I must regain control over my life — what’s left of it — but to do that I have to accept the fact that I will die.  Submit to it.  And only then will I be able to stand tall and move forward, marching toward the inevitable while still enjoy what’s left.  I don’t know if I’m up to the task.

Wish me luck.