Fast Times At The Near-Death Hotel

My varying degrees of success with open-heart surgeries

The author and his stretchy muscles.

I have Marfan Syndrome. If you don’t know what that is, look it up. Google exists. Just kidding. It’s a genetic disorder that affects the proteins in connective tissue. One of my doctors put it best: “You have stretchy muscles.”

Stretchy muscles? That doesn’t sound so bad, right? But what that doctor left out is stretchy muscles mean “weak.” I am weak. This is my defining characteristic.

I have weak, stretchy arms. Weak, stretchy legs. Even weak, stretchy eyes because, as we all know, the eyes are muscles.

Of course, the heart is the muscle where Marfan patients get into the most trouble.

The heart constantly pumps blood to your cardiovascular system under immense pressure. If you think of veins and arteries as tubes or hoses that take the blood to various parts of your body, you start to understand how a weak, stretchy hose could be a recipe for disaster. So when the walls of an artery weaken and bubble out, this causes an aneurysm. In medicine, you want to fix aneurysms or at least watch them and manage their size.

So, my adult life has been divided into two phases: managing the size of my aneurysms and fixing…