There's No Playbook For This
I will never forget the day our journey took an unexpected turn.
It all started November 28th, 2018. I was driving from an offsite work meeting to my office. It was a meeting that I led and it had gone well, so I was feeling pretty good. I called my wife on the drive to check in with her. Earlier that morning she had a follow up appointment with a cardiologist to review an echocardiogram. The cardiologist said that she would let us know if anything serious was found prior to the appointment, so we figured the appointment was simply a formality.
When I asked my wife how the appointment went, she burst into tears. She began to explain that she had an aortic aneurysm.
I struggled as I was trying to drive, to hold my wife’s emotions, and understand the details of what it means to have an aortic aneurysm. Over the next few minutes, I learned that one of the largest blood vessels exiting her heart (the aorta) was enlarged (aneurysm), weakening its structural integrity, and increasing the likelihood of rupture or dissection. The consequences of an aortic aneurysm rupture or dissection are catastrophic and the only way to address the aneurysm is open heart surgery.
I asked my wife all of the questions I could think of and attempted to process everything I had just learned. I stopped by my office to drop a few things off and then left to meet up with my wife to pick up our son at school. As we loaded our son in the car, I gave my wife a hug and we both cried in the middle of the elementary school parking lot.
We were scared…so scared. We didn’t know what we were up against. We only had questions.
Would she be okay?
Will she make it?
How hard is open heart surgery and its recovery?
Will she be able to see our then five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter grow up?
Can we just fix it now?
Can this just go away?
We don’t know what to do, what do we do next?
There is no playbook for this.
That day was so hard, but my wife has since had a successful surgery and recovery is well under way. There is still more progress to be made, but we have come so far.
I will always remember November 28th, 2018 as it was the first day of a long journey through fear, questions, surgery, more fear, pain, recovery, stress, but ultimately gratitude and redemption. It is not a path that I would choose to take, but the path that was laid in front of me. A path that I needed to travel and now understand more clearly what I have to be grateful for and how God has held me and my family from the start.
What journey or path are you on? Can you look back to when or where it started? What progress have you made? How have you grown?
Adam Benjamin
Restoration Project Advocate
