I am off to Oregon to get my camper van next week! The imminence of actually having to deal with parking that sucker has finally gotten me in gear to start the process of selling my condo. As per my plan, I’ve done a pretty good job of de-cluttering over the last coupla months – [...]
(I had so much fun yakking about my health, but with luck there won’t be much more of that to yak about in the future, so this is your notice that I will be more and more yakking about just random stuff in my life) I’ve been home almost six weeks, and I have been [...]
I am home, back in Reno with a big ole scar down the middle of my chest and a new list of pills to take. This will I think be the final post in the Heart Surgery Odyssey series. The basic outline of my post-op recovery overseas was to be a week in the hospital, [...]
Well, here we are, the day before the big day. There is one more test this morning, some kind of sonogram-ish thing to check the condition of my cardioid arteries, and I am good to go. In the evening the barber shows up for my full body shave. He was a funny little dude that [...]
Saturday May 23 (still working on the travelogue part of this below) This is a new-ish hospital (five years old) out in the far suburbs – the countryside really – and they are working hard to attract an international clientele. It is right on the Sea of Marmara, my new favorite place, and every room [...]
It was difficult to start the original blog until I had some kind of plan to report. Otherwise, all I would have had to say was “boy I sure am fucked and let me whine about it for a while”, which is a little boring. But once the medical tourist plan going, it was [...]
“hi, my name is John. I’m going to Turkey in a few days …. for a heart operation.” My public presentation of “things” has been morphing lately. It started three weeks ago when I visited Martha in good ole Marin County. As luck would have it Vinyl was playing a show on a funky old [...]
This is a nuts and bolts update, with facts, numbers and links. Many of you expressed interest in the gory details of what I’m doing, so here goes. The very first hit on my google search for “overseas heart operation” was the same folks referenced in the CNN article (Jul 09 – actually not! The [...]
Background For the last seven years I have had a high-stakes gamble with the US health care system. Eight years ago, since losing my fat corporate job, I was paying $320/month for $5000 deductible insurance. I was a basically healthy person, and it seemed that I was p–ssing away my retirement savings with nothing to [...]
epilogue
It has been a year and a half since my first post to this blog. In that time I have spent $25,000 on fixin’ my heart, had a lot of drama including an exotic Asian adventure, and written over 11,000 words in nine posts :) only to be right back pretty much where I started, [...]