Today is my 49th birthday.
I’m not telling you that to get attention. Realistically, my mom did all the work this day 49 years ago, so thank you mom!
I bring up my birthday because six months ago I was in the hospital waiting on open-heart surgery. I had absolute faith in Dr. Figueroa and wasn’t worried about the surgery itself. What I realized then is a little more than a week before that I had been shoveling snow. A month before that I had a heart attack that I denied. If things had gone differently, I might never have made it to the hospital for that surgery. From there never gotten the chance to celebrate this birthday.
A few days after my surgery, while I was recovering in the hospital, my youngest daughter Jamison told me that some people regard times like that as a new birthday. It’s a chance to restart and look at everything with a new eye. When I got home from the hospital, my friend Danny Boyd welcomed me to the Second Chance Club. I liked where both of them were headed. I was given another shot and I’m not about to waste it.
Before I left the hospital, I determined I was going to get in shape to be given permission to scuba dive again. I got that letter signed a couple weeks ago. I haven’t been diving yet, but I will soon. That goal met, it’s time to shift gears and set my sights on a new one. Without something to shoot for, it would be too easy for me to backslide and lose the gains I’ve made.
My next target is to jog a 5K race. Not just walk it, but I want to jog the 3.1 miles at a decent pace. That said, I don’t really care if I am the last one to finish. This is about me pushing myself, not competing with others. The Charleston Heart Walk is September 10. I’ve set up a team on the Charleston Heart Walk website called Team Second Chance and hope to get some friends to join me. (You don’t have to jog with me, if you don’t want. Just come out and walk.) You can search by team names to join me.
My goal is to give more people a second chance at life, and hopefully spare some of those people the pain of open-heart surgery. Maybe we’ll all celebrate a few more birthdays as well.
We’ll call your participation a birthday present to both of us.