Robert Talbert

Today (the spring equinox, hence the title) marks exactly six weeks since my heart surgery, and it's been a busy last week in the recovery process. Last week I had an echocardiogram to see how the new aortic valve is doing, along with a chest x-ray to see how my sternum is healing and look for anything out of the ordinary. Then I had the big 5-week followup with my surgeon. It was all good: The valve has zero leakage, the pressure coming out of the heart was perfectly normal, and all the muscl...

Here's a quick update on my health and surgery recovery now that we've passed into March. Shortly after the last post on February 20, I had an issue with irregular heartbeat. It wasn't a full-blown atrial fibrillation like I experienced in the hospital because my heart rate never really got elevated like it did then. But my heart would skip a beat, then add 2-3 extra beats, etc. etc. at random intervals. It felt like a muscle tic you sometimes get in different parts of your body --- a nervous ...

Time for a little update since it's been two weeks since the heart surgery and a little over one week since coming home from the hospital. Every day I am getting a little closer to being back to normal. I still have some way to go --- no 5K runs for me any time soon, and I can't even drive until some time in March. But I think I've come a long way in two weeks. Consider 10 days ago versus now: 10 days ago, I was doing three walks a day around "7 Heart" (seventh floor of the Meijer Heart Hos...

This is my third day since arriving back home from the hospital. Keeping in mind that my primary responsibility right now is to take it easy and let my body heal, there's still a lot of things that I need to do during the day, along with some challenges to normal activities and an emerging routine to how the day is going. A typical day so far looks a little like this: Get up around 6:00am as the girls get ready for school. (It's noisy.) Have a single cup of strong black coffee. Well before ...

The surgery is over and I am back home now. It was a bit longer of a stay than I thought it would be, and I was only making real updates on my Facebook page and my wife's page. So in this post I just want to recap all that went on during my stay. The surgery was Wednesday (Feb 6) morning. My wife and I rolled into downtown Grand Rapids and the Fred Meijer Heart Hospital around 6am after a tricky commute on icy roads. Around 8:00am, I was fully prepped for surgery and the anesthetist gave me the...

If all goes according to plan, this time tomorrow I will be on the operating table. This will probably be the last post I make here before the surgery happens, and (assuming all goes well) for several days following, since I'll just be too mentally out-of-it to write anything coherent. (Although coherence never stood in my way before.) Yesterday I was at GVSU for some final closing-out tasks and a couple of meetings. More than one of my colleagues was surprised to see me there -- and a few mor...

Yesterday I had my final pre-operation meeting at the heart hospital, with Cathy and one of the cardiac nurses. The purpose this time was to get our FMLA leave paperwork filled out (finally!) and to go over the game plan for the next few days and into my recovery period. We learned at the meeting that the results from the x-ray procedure I mentioned last time indicated that I was indeed eligible for the "minimally invasive" form of the valve replacement surgery, which means that my surgeon wil...

It's 16 days until my aortic valve replacement surgery. It's been fairly quiet on the health front, but now the February 6 date shows up in the "two-week" view on Google Calendar which drives home the reality of what's going to happen. Yesterday I went into Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids to get a CT scan done, so my surgeon can determine just how invasive the surgery needs to be. The choices basically are "incredibly invasive" (the incision in my chest will be about 3-4 inches long) or ...

Greetings. This morning Cathy and I met with the surgeon who will be performing my open-heart surgery to discuss a few remaining options and some of the details surrounding the procedure. Here are some new bit of info from this meeting. First and perhaps most importantly, we finally have a date for the surgery: Wednesday, February 6. This is a bit later than I originally thought it would be, but in fact I think this date is just right. It gives me a full month to get my head down at GVSU and ...

Hi again. First of all, I want to thank all of you who sent well-wishes and prayers following my previous post. It means the world to me, to know that I have so many keeping me in their prayers and thoughts throughout this journey toward getting my heart fixed. (Or as I've started calling it, "getting upgraded".) As I mentioned in the last post, today was the day I went into Meijer Heart Hopsital in Grand Rapids for two more procedures prior to the surgery itself. I just got back from this vis...

I'm writing this post to update friends, family, and others who are interested about some recent issues with my health and what those issues mean for me in the coming months. I'll continue to use this website (https://listed.standardnotes.org/@rtalbert) to post updates in case you want to keep up. Many of you know that I used to be a runner, doing 5K and 10K races pretty regularly. About a year and a half ago, I was doing a run indoors on our treadmill when I suddenly felt very short of breath...