This morning I had a little victory. It is silly, really, in the grand scheme of things. But not necessarily silly to me because it relates to my heart.

I don’t talk much about the sequelae of my heart surgery. As the experience fades further into the distance, life is mostly back to normal and one could almost forget it happened at all. 

But it did happen and there are unseen ways the experience still affects me. For example, from time to time I am reminded of the reality that I do have a risk of recurrence and/or I might need more surgeries down the road. I have a handful of restrictions and ways I am supposed to be careful. I’m also on a lifelong surveillance plan requiring imaging and cardiology visits. I don’t worry or even think about this much, but I am aware of it, especially when the visits approach. 

There are other outcomes that are quieter and affect me every day. For one, I have less stamina in general and get tired earlier in the evening. This one is compounded by my age or, rather, my middle age. But it is still noticeable. Also, my heart likes to take little joy rides for no good reason and sometimes thumps so profoundly that it feels like a salmon has taken up residence in my chest. A salmon I can actually hear. It doesn’t hurt, but it feels weird.

The outcome that bothers me the most though is what happens when I run. My exercise tolerance tanked after surgery. My heart rate skyrockets even at a slow pace, which means I have to stop and walk to bring it back into a safe range. This cycle repeats over and over again with little improvement over time. It is really frustrating for someone who used to be able to run for miles without walk breaks and had worked hard to get to that point. (To be clear I was never fast, but I didn’t need walk breaks). 

At my check-ins, my wonderful cardiologist quietly hands me tissues as I lament how frustrating it is that my heart, itself, was perfectly fine before surgery and now it’s not. He likes to remind me that my heart was an innocent bystander in a surgery that saved my life. He has made it clear he’d actually prefer I just walk. When we have these conversations, the sullen teenager in me thinks, “Blah, blah, blah, I get it and I hate it.” 

I know plenty of people who run/walk and allegedly it’s even better exercise than running. That’s all well and fine. But this is a very noticeable change for me. The activity I used to enjoy to clear my mind is now the very thing that reminds me I have a lifelong condition. I am the only one who notices and I am the only one who laments it. Everyone else is just happy I am alive. And fair enough.

But I am alive with an asterisk. I am still affected by the experience and I am still at risk for future issues. Yet I get the sense that I am not supposed to feel anything but grateful for my aliveness. Because when I’m honest about the realities of my new normal, whether trivial or significant, people often get confused and point out I should just be grateful I am alive. Here again, the teenager in me shows up and wants to clap back that most people in my life get to be alive without an asterisk. They just get to be alive. And I can’t help but also wish that I could be alive without any risk factors or sequelae, either. It doesn’t make me ungrateful. It just makes me human. 

Because I am grateful. I am so deeply, profoundly grateful for everything my asterisk represents. I am grateful that God spared my life through the hands of brilliant, compassionate medical teams. I am grateful that I get to be here as my babies grow into adults. I am grateful that I can run or walk at all. I am grateful that I have a full, beautiful life and I am healthy enough to live it well. I know that in the grand scheme of things, it is not a big deal that I can’t run as fast or as far as I could before. I know its merely a nuisance that my heart goes cattywampus, as long as it stays benign. Of course I know all of that. But it is ok to feel gratitude and grief when an experience calls for both.

The beautiful truth is that God sees me in all of this. He sees my gratitude and he sees my grief and he sees my frustrations and he sees my victories. I am loved by el Roi, “the God who sees me,” (Gen. 16:13). We all are. The God who sees meets us in every circumstance as we experience all the complexities of life on this side of Heaven. Our Creator knows we are only human and He sympathizes with us in our weakness (Heb. 4:15). He is merciful (Luke 6:36) and His compassions never fail (Lam. 3:22-23). 

Our good, good Father knows we can be extremely grateful and a little sad at the same time. He doesn’t expect us to walk around in a saccharine daze, oblivious to the ways that life is hard. Instead, our compassionate God walks us through the nuances of each experience, comforts us, refines us and shows us how to glorify Him through it all. This is what I am most grateful for of all.

The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made. Psalm 145:8-9. 

So anyway, back to today’s victory. On my little walk/run, I had the fastest time I have had since surgery. A running time that would have been frustrating for me before surgery was a little fist-pump-worthy now. This victory was laced with a touch of sadness over that fact. But I know my God sees me. So I was happy. I acknowledged the grief. I celebrated a little. And I kept running.