Why Do You Call It +Time?

Are You Sure You Want Me to Answer Your Question, John?!

How Why did this blog come to be called +Time? Asked on the spur of the moment, instead of having a circle of old and new friends roll their eyes while I muddled through mentally and tried to convert stream of consciousness to intelligible explanation, I said I didn’t remember. But here it is after first thinking and remembering, and second going back to January 2011 CaringBridge postings to verify.

Begins with several, three or four years, of slow to come on and increasingly developing and more and more severe chest pains. An early remembered event, but by no means first, was during a trip Linda, Kristen and I took to St. Augustine. We drove over as soon as school was out, because when Kristen’s HNES class went there by bus a few weeks earlier, Kris had taken sick and she and Linda had stayed in the motel room the whole visit, and Kristen was upset and disappointed and wanted to go back, and whatever Kris wants Papa does. Over the past 55 years I’ve had three girls of my very own and for each one nobody loves little girls more than their Daddy, their Papa, which is to say, obsessively, protectively, totally and forever; for my girls: OMG I love you so. When was this St. Augustine trip? Don’t remember which year the HNES class goes to St. A but, it may have been the eighth grade year, eh, let’s assume so: spring 2007. After a nice seafood dinner the evening we arrived in St. Augustine, we decided to walk round town. As the angina started, I knew that I would not be able to walk, so complained of indigestion and sat down on a bench to wait while Linda and Kristen walked. The foolishness of it all throughout: don’t tell Linda what it is, she’ll only worry.

Over the next months and three years, I researched online and learned that it was “unstable angina” and that the average life expectancy after first symptoms was two years. No doubt what it was, because my father (1993) and my paternal grandmother (1947) both had this heart condition. 

More than three years later, by that Sunday morning, October 17, 2010, after having worked at Cove School overseeing contractor work all summer long, the angina was almost constant. Walking across the street from our Parish House to the Mary Stuart Poole Library, I would have to stop at least once and pretend to admire the sky and the trees while the pain subsided. No pity story, just the facts, m’am. After Sunday School class that particular Sunday I realized that Ordinary Time was ending: I could hardly make it from the Library to the Church for ten-thirty worship, told the rector that I was overwhelmingly exhausted and had to go home, told Linda where she was sitting in her pew, left church, drove home, where Linda said “You are green, your face is green, what’s wrong?” First Daughter the Nurse said take him to the ER at BayMed and tell them, “My husband is having chest pains.” 

John, you're the one who asked the question: Are you sure you want to hear this nonsense?

Admitted to hospital immediately for several days tests, I was diagnosed with severe aortic stenosis, needing a valve replacement and bypass grafts, inoperable and if operated would die on the operating table, too risky for local surgeons even to consider, two to five months to live, go home and enjoy life or try to find a major heart institute that would take me. With the love of family, and the help of Holy Nativity School Foundation board members who over the years had become closer than extended family and just as beloved, I was hustled off to Cleveland Clinic, the number one heart institute in the world. The magic jet plane flight left Panama City airport Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at one p.m. and arrived at Cleveland Lakefront 105 minutes later for tests and with surgery scheduled for predawn Monday, January 24, by the chief of cardiothoracic surgery himself! If you only get one chance, go with the guy who does nothing else and has done several of these a day every day for many years, and who looks at you astonished when you ask whether he can do it!

Thinking about phases of life, and that I was more than four years into the two year life expectancy with unstable angina, and now three months into my two-to-five months prognosis, I talked with Jeremy about phases of soccer and of cricket. It isn’t like American football, where the clock runs everything -- five seconds left in the fourth quarter, four, three, two, one, BUZZZZZZ, game over and the coaches head across the field to shake hands and congratulate each other on a game well played, one grinning broadly, the other grimacing through gritted teeth. But in European Sport it’s not up to the clock, Jeremy said, it’s up to the referee, the referee decides when the match is over. The game is played during ordinary time and the referee decides if it goes into stoppage time and extraordinary time.

So I self-decreed that for me, Ordinary Time ended the instant the plane left the ECP runway, and Stoppage Time started, at the Referee’s discretion. Stoppage Time lasted seven days, throughout the pre-op time at Cleveland Clinic until I was wheeled away to the OR. Extraordinary Time would start if/as I wakened, looking up at Nicholas and Joe. At 1:40 PM on Monday, January 24, 2010, daughter Tass started blogging on CB for me, Extraordinary Time Day One. Extraordinary Time goes at the sole discretion of the Referee.

By the time we left Cleveland on February 8, 2011, Jeremy had set up a Blog for me, to use instead of CB, and I had decided that instead of ExtraordinaryTime it would be +Time. Call it plus-time or cross-time, it’s all up to the Referee from this point forward.

Ordinary Time, Stoppage Time, Extraordinary Time to +Time.

TW+ in +Time