Most everyone who reads this blog knows me, but I thought I would go ahead and explain the whole Monkey Heart talk that goes on in my writing. I have a monkey heart. Really, an actual monkey heart. I was born with a bad ticker and through the amazing world of Dr. Frankenstein and Texas Heart Institute, I was given a monkey's heart. I have provided a picture of my scar just to prove how much my heart is that of a monkey's.
Do you believe me? Of course you don't! Haha! Okay, so you got me. I don't REALLY have a monkey heart but it is pretty fun to try and convince strangers of this phenomenon. I was born with a few congenital heart defects. To be more specific, I was born with an atrial septal defect (ASD), a ventricular septal defect (VSD), and a coacrtation of the aorta. Dr. Denton Cooley (he performed the first successful human heart transplant back in 1968) performed both my surgeries at Texas Heart Institute in Houston, TX. My first surgery took place when I was six weeks old and they closed up the holes when I was two.
My life has consisted of numerous trips to a cardiologist, lots of medical students standing in on my exams and listening to my heart, and dentists refusing to clean my teeth until I have "premedicated" (taking antibiotics so I don't get endocarditis and die).
Speaking of endocarditis, "Don't scratch that mosquito bite! You'll catch endocarditis and die!" I heard this and similar statements from my mother my entire life. Heck, she still says this to me on occasion. It's become somewhat of a joke to me now and I often say, "Don't look at that! You'll get endocarditis and die!" Hahaha! Aren't morbid jokes funny? I think so. I know it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, me joking like that but I choose to believe that if you can't laugh about your condition then you are taking your life WAY too seriously. Everyone has to die sometime and according to my early doctors (before my parents were able to take me to Texas Heart), I'm already on borrowed time.
So, here's to living with a monkey heart and taking lots of antibiotics and making funny jokes about my condition. Laugh, because life is too short to be sad about the cards you have been dealt. And look at it this way - I wasn't blessed with a big bosom and Dr. Cooley just drew on some cleavage for me. Thanks, Dr. C!
