When you’ve had a lot of health problems and you have to make your annual pilgrimage to the cardiologist, you want to hear only good things. I was lucky because basically, I heard nothing.

No news is good news. Everything is working properly. My blood pressure is pretty much where it needs to be. My pacemaker works, so my heart beats neatly and right on time. This is good because without the pacemaker, my heart won’t beat. At all. I don’t suffer from rhythm issues. In simplest terms, without a pacemaker, my heart stops.

I mentioned to my cardiologist that my chest hasn’t healed. So Dr. Gentile said: “You know when you can expect your chest to heal?”

“Never?” I suggested.

“You got it,” he said.

Bones are not the problem. It’s cartilage. Your chest moves so you can breathe and therefore, the bones in your chest are connected by cartilage. My cartilage never grew back. So the chest bones crunch. They go out of alignment and I have to push them back in place.

The torn ligaments in my knee never never grew back either, so I have had a ruptured anterior crucis ligament for the past 55 years. I never got it repaired because that repair fails as often as not AND it takes a long time to heal. So I’ve got a wonky left knee and a crunchy chest which will stay crunchy.

And that’s it until next year. I didn’t expect to hear anything much and that is exactly what I heard. Not much. There’s nothing wrong with me that wasn’t wrong before.

I think I’ll make shrimp tomorrow. Maybe I’ll take it out to defrost tonight. Shrimp scampi anyone?

Categories: #Health, Anecdote, Heart

Tags: #Health, Marilyn Armstrong