There’s a test called a CAC scan.  If you haven’t heard of it, you probably will soon. CAC stands for coronary artery calcium.  I’m not a doctor, but my untrained, overly simplistic understandIng goes something like this: If your coronary arteries are inflamed or damaged, your body responds by coating the damage in layers of plaque.  Plaque is made of fat, cholesterol, calcium, “animal style” french fries, Cheetos, chocolate croissants and maple bacon.

A chunk of time has passed since I inked in the second eye of the Daruma. My body has continued to heal, and I generally feel better than I have in a long time, despite the fact that the years keep accumulating. Throughout most of that chunk a worldwide pandemic has been raging, but in my own little world of health, not much has happened.

2018 was a tough year for me. For starters, just a couple of days into the new year, I had major heart surgery. Despite the fact that I had walked a thousand miles around Japan the previous spring, and run a competitive half-marathon in October, in January nurses were high-fiving me for walking 25 meters down the hallway mostly on my own.

It has been three months since the ablation procedure. Since my last post, which was fairly optimistic, things got worse, and I got very discouraged. I fired off an email to my cardiologist, full of anger and desperation about how my heart was going dippy at the slightest provocation.

I used to have a 1966 Volkswagen van. It was the best vehicle I’ve ever owned. To this day I have dreams about driving it. It was white, with wings painted by the previous owner on the two forward doors. I bought it in 1980, just before heading cross-country to go to grad school at Northwestern University in Chicago.

I’m not a doctor, so I’m not going to try to sound like one. I’m going to resist the urge, for today anyway, to use words like “atrial fibrillation” or “bradycardia.” But I don’t have to be a doctor to observe that sometimes my heart behaves in predictable ways, and sometimes it goes wildly off in unexpected directions.

There is a war going on inside my body, between the forces of good and evil. When the good guys are winning, my newly remodeled heart does what it is supposed to: it beats faster when I exercise, with a solid correlation between the rate of beating and the intensity of the exercise, and it slows down when I’m done. With the bad guys, there’s no telling what might happen. My heart breaks all of the rules.

I’ve been walking a lot lately. I walked 14 miles about a week and a half ago, 11 the other day, and 12 today. It’s Training for Shikoku all over again, but this time I’m not preparing for an adventure, I’m just trying to get back in the game.

I have a Ferrari 1955 410 Superamerica with a 5.0 liter V12 engine, 335 hp and triple Weber carburetors. I used to drive it really fast, but the years and the miles added up. I had to have the engine rebuilt.

I’m coming up on the three month anniversary of my heart surgery. I’m excited about this, because it means that I get to stop taking blood thinning medicine.