Gratitude for being alive

I had open heart surgery in 2016 to fix a leaky heart valve, and wrote a series of Quora answers about the experience. This one was in answer to the question "How has having open heart surgery changed your life?"

It sounds cheesy to say, but I am genuinely happy that I went through the experience of life-threatening surgery. It changed me in two significant ways:

I feel a deeper understanding of health issues in other people, and the immense challenge it forces upon patients and families. Heart surgery was easily the scariest thing that has ever happened to me (and high up there for my family and loved ones), which is noteworthy because I had every conceivable advantage: A slow-developing condition that was very well-understood by doctors; A world-class medical team; A surgery that, though invasive for the patient, had statistically very very good outcomes; A kind and accommodating workplace with excellent health insurance and boss (thanks David Cole!) who gave me ample time off to recover. Ultimately this entire ordeal was a few months of stress leading up to the surgery, a few months of recovery afterwards that was bad but not awful, and now I’m back to my charmed life.

But at each stage of that process it was evident to me how much worse it could be, and is for many others: Aggressive cancer requiring years of chemotherapy, any hour of which is more torturous than anything I experienced; A terminal condition with little to no hope of survival; A possible procedure or cure, but not having the money or insurance to get the treatment you know exists. With health care policy being debated in 2017, there’s no shortage of these stories in the news. Each of these stories hits a chord within me that they didn’t before. I believe there’s nothing quite like having your own body be vulnerable and broken, and subject to pain and risk and invasion. Despite knowing intellectually how hard this experience must be for others, it was hard to truly understand until going through it myself. Imagining all these stages in the process, and much more helpless and agonizing each can be for many many others, is devastating.

I try and channel this feeling into the most profound change I experienced: a deep sense of gratitude for the simple fact of being alive. I’d been working for years, mostly via meditation, to cultivate a mindset of appreciation and gratitude — but it was mostly intellectual. I knew that most people aren’t born into the life I was. And I knew, cognitively and rationally, that being alive and healthy was a lot better than being dead. But I don’t think that I felt these things, on an experiential, visceral, gut level.

It was a truly unique experience to know that there was one particular Tuesday in June where I might not be alive the next day. I knew the lights might go out, that my favorite movie might stop halfway through and I wouldn’t get to see the ending. After the high-risk period post-surgery was over (about a week), I experienced an appreciation for simple things that was almost comical. I went on daily doctor-mandated walks, and I would literally stop and smell flowers, or just stand in the sun smiling. It sounds extremely cheesy, like a bad medical TV drama, but in that period I was just overwhelmingly, gleefully, joyfully alive — I felt every second of it. I’ve tried to hold onto that feeling since then, especially when experiencing all the small annoyances that everyday life provides, to mixed success. But somewhere inside I retain the memory of those first few days when I realized they weren’t going to turn the lights off.

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