January 7, 2025 • 38 mins
Hey Hey Heart Buddies and Happy New Year!
Season 5 of Open Heart Surgery with Boots is here. Wow. Thank you for being along for the ride that is this life and this podcast.
I had the honor of interviewing Jeremy Rothenberg who shares his incredible journey, which began with an Apple Watch alert and ended in a life-changing open-heart surgery. Jeremy reveals what it’s like to go from feeling healthy and fit to confronting a shocking diagnosis (cirrhosis of the liver) and managing the whirlwind of emotions that follow. We explore his advice on regulating the nervous system, his candid recount of his surgery, and his inspiring post-op accomplishments. Whether you're curious about heart health, or you're in need of motivation to tackle life’s challenges, this episode offers a raw and uplifting narrative that will leave you pondering the preciousness of each heartbeat.
I wish I lived closer to Jeremy. He is such a light. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.
Read about and get in touch with Jeremy here.
Boots Knighton has been an educator since the late 1990s in all facets of education including high school science, middle school mathematics, elementary reading, college level ecology, ski instruction, backpacking, and experiential education. Her greatest teacher has been her heart thanks to a surprise diagnosis in 2020 (during the pandemic) of three different congenital heart defects. She is now thriving after her open-heart surgery on January 15, 2021 and is on a mission to raise awareness through her podcast, The Heart Chamber: patient stories of open-heart surgery and recovery, that heart surgery can be an incredible opportunity to begin again in life and live life wide open.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
When she said that, a light bulb went off in my mind because in
1990, 34 years ago now,
I had a case of acute pericarditis, which meant
that my pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds your heart and
protects your heart, became inflamed, probably from a
virus. We don't know. I was traveling. I was on
(00:24):
an overnight train in Spain, coming from. I had been in
Morocco, and while trying to sleep, my chest started
to close down, my breathing started to get painful,
and so I hopped off the bed and I walked back and forth in
the train like I would do if I was spinning
from too much alcohol or something and just try to bear down and get
(00:46):
through it. But it just kept getting worse and worse.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode
of Open Heart Surgery with Boots. Oh, my gosh.
We are coming up on the two year anniversary of when I even had
this idea of starting a podcast for open
heart surgery. And hilariously, I didn't even listen to
(01:08):
podcasts, and it just kind of came to me like this
existential nudge. And here
I am two years later, and what you don't
see is Michael Mori, who is my engineer in the
background, who helps me edit these episodes.
And I think I'm making his job easier because I'm saying less
(01:30):
ums. So thank you for sticking with
me all this time and thank you for continuing to come back.
Please do consider supporting this podcast on Patreon. You
can find the links in the show notes. This is definitely not
done for free, and I have been so happy and
honored to keep this podcast going. But it does feel
(01:52):
good when I see support coming from willing
donors. And if you sign up for the second or third
tier, then you get to be a part of the Zoom community, which
I'm just now getting going. So be sure to go check that out. And
you will absolutely make my year if you become a Patreon
supporter. But, oh, my goodness. Enough jabbering.
(02:15):
Let's get to today's episode with Jeremy Rothenberg. Jeremy,
welcome. You're coming to us from Ashland, Oregon,
and I could not be more tickled to have you. And you
are, my gosh, I think my second or third friend that I've made actually
through substack, so substack for the win.
Nice. Jeremy, will you please introduce
(02:37):
yourself and kind of set the scene of, like, who you are,
what you're about. You have overcome an incredible
story that I have never heard of before. So I'm even more excited
about that. I mean, I'm not Excited about what happened to you, but I'm excited
to have your story on the podcast. But first, set the
scene of who Jeremy Rothenberg is. Oh, thank you.
(03:00):
So happy to be here and talk to you after listening to you for so
long. Who I am. I am an
acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist, and I'm
also a wellness coach. I sometimes call myself an
executive wellness coach because I work with executives
and creative professionals and mostly in the tech industry. We're. Once
(03:21):
upon a time, I used to work and I live in
Ashland, Oregon. Moved here about six years ago
from Oakland, the Bay Area and California, where
I had an acupuncture practice for 10 years and before that
did about 15 years doing various types of producing and
product managing in the. In the. In the tech industry. Yeah. Do you want me
(03:43):
to go on from there or. Well, I just gotta say, that's quite the
pivot. Yeah. Well, this. This all plays.
Plays nicely in, in this whole story. Just very briefly
on that. You know, working in that world, I
felt that I wasn't really doing what I was meant to
be doing in life. Even though I liked it. It was. It was fun,
(04:06):
smart people. I was making a good amount of money. I always felt drained,
and I always felt like I was losing energy rather than gaining
energy. And at one point, I had an
experience where I started having panic attacks after
having my heart starting to skip a beat.
So one day. I'll just tell a quick story. One day I was
(04:28):
working a small job as a favor for my
cousin over the Christmas holiday, and I was
qaing back then, what was CD
ROMs know like
for? Yeah, and. And it was such a. It was
such a repetitive job that I really wasn't that happy
(04:50):
about doing, but I was. I was doing it anyway. And I. My. I felt
my heart started to skip beats and it.
It like threw me into a panic attack. Why? Because weeks before
that, I had just come home from visiting my father on the
east coast after he had quintuple bypass
surgery with Dr. Oz. And yes, it's
(05:12):
that Dr. Oz what he was back. Back then when he
was still a top cardiac surgeon in New York
before he became the character that you know him as.
And my father had quintuple bypass surgery, which is
like, I think as many as you can possibly have. And I had these
skipped beats and suddenly something came in my mind that something was wrong with
(05:35):
my heart. And I had these panic attacks which led
to me working briefly with an energy healer
who set me completely at ease Set my
heart completely at ease. And I realized, you know what,
two things here. One, I have to learn to do what he did.
And number two, I have to do what I know that I'm supposed to be
(05:57):
doing in life, which is helping people and working directly
with the mind and the body rather than on
these interactive products, you know, that I, that I was
working on for in the tech industry. That was the beginning of this
story, to be quite honest, because it will come back, we'll come back to understand
that those immediate, those skipped beats were a
(06:20):
result of something that led to the surgery that I had last
year. And I'm still stuck on Dr. Oz. I honestly forgot
he was, he was. Actually a top
surgeon, I believe, at Columbia Presbyterian
in New York City. I'm gonna have to dig into that separately.
He. He really. Okay, that's for another time.
(06:42):
That's. Yeah. So it's just an interesting thing. Yeah.
So, okay, yeah, you've set the scene, but like, give us the
big overarching picture of. Well, first of all, how old are
you? So I'm 55 years old now. That was
back in 2001 or
2002, when I first started feeling these
(07:04):
heart related symptoms that I just.
And I had those checked out and they were checked out to be normal. They
were called PVCs, premature ventricular contractions.
People have them. It wasn't considered an
issue. It was only, only looking back 20 years now that I
realized that maybe they had something to do with this issue
(07:26):
of my pericardium. Yeah. Which, which. That's the great
segue into giving us the big picture of. Give us
the 50,000 foot view. And then we're going to go back and connect
some dots and help the listeners understand your
process. Yeah. So last year, well, In
August of 2023, I was
(07:48):
diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, which
was as astonishing as it could possibly be because I didn't
have any symptoms of liver
cirrhosis. And I was only
investigating my liver because
a year before that I started having atrial
(08:09):
fibrillation. And atrial fibrillation is when the atrium of your
heart start to beat wildly. And
it's usually not a life threatening situation, but
it can cause blood clots, which can cause stroke. So there
is concern about it. I tripped into
atrial fibrillation two weeks before my daughter's bat
(08:31):
mitzvah in, in 2023
and didn't come out of it for three
months. Because I live in a small town, I
couldn't get to see a cardiologist for Three months. And because
I was in pretty good shape, it didn't really affect me that much. The only
reason why I knew that I had the atrial fibrillation is because my apple watch
(08:53):
told me I did. You know, it alerted me and said, you have atrial fibrillation.
I started measuring everything and I realized, oh, my. My
resting heart rate is now 30 beats above what it was
before. And when I exercise, everything goes about 30 beats higher
than it did before. So I ha. I eventually had to get a
cardio version, which is a shock, like a defibrillator, but in a,
(09:15):
you know, in a surgical environment. And I did that.
January 2024. And that's reset my heart
rhythm. And that was great. And I talked to my cardiologist and I said,
hey, many years ago, I was tested for life
insurance, and they came back with the blood test,
and everything was normal except this one liver enzyme called
(09:36):
ggt, which they normally don't test for. But when
it's high, mine was kind of off the charts high. When it's high, it can
signal that you might be an alcoholic or you might have some, like,
bile duct issues. So the life insurance people are.
That's. They cut you out. And I was shocked about that.
And I talked for. To doctors, any doctor I would see over the next
(09:58):
bunch of years, I would ask about that. And they all kind of shrugged their
shoulders and they're like, well, if everything else is normal, your alt ast,
the other liver enzymes, which are normally checked, they're normal. It's probably just
who you are. You probably just have a weird GGT level. And so
I went on with my life. Never didn't really think about it too
much. But I asked my cardiologist at this point, I said, you know, I
(10:20):
have this high GGT thing. Could this have anything to do with my atrial
fibrillation? And she said, well, she didn't know. She did some
tests, came back, everything came back negative. She sent, then sent
me to a GI people, and I had coordinated
my cardio version to be at the beginning of the year so that I could
use up my deductible immediately so that I could,
(10:41):
you know, use my insurance that year as much as possible. And so
my deductible was up. I said, okay, I'll go do a bunch of lab tests.
That's fine. And so I went to see a GI person,
went through all these lab tests. Some of them started coming back a little off.
Had an ultrasound of the liver or of the
abdomen. And that said, like, you know, there were some blood flow issues in the
(11:02):
liver, so we did something called a
elastography ultrasound, which measures the. The
flexibility and the density of, of an organ. So
that was. Say that again, slower elast.
Elastography, like elastic
elastography. I've never heard of that. I hadn't
either. And. And that comes back with a scale of
(11:25):
zero to four for liver fibrosis, four
being cirrhosis. Liver cirrhosis. Mine came back at
four. And I remember, you know, reading that
result at my kitchen table and just my jaw
dropping to the floor. This is weeks after a very, very
close friend of mine died from cancer. And I was like,
(11:47):
wow, my turn. And
that was shocking. Absolutely shocking roller coaster
because why would you have liver cirrhosis?
Right? I was not an alcoholic. I generally
eat a, you know, healthy, generally low carb
diet. There's no way I had a fatty liver or anything like that.
(12:09):
So we assumed that it must be like some kind of autoimmune
disease. We checked for autoimmune hepatitis,
hepatitis, anything under the sun. All of it came back a little
inconclusive, but mostly, mostly negative.
And interestingly, where I live. Right, you don't. The. What
I found out is you have a certain level of medical availability
(12:31):
here, and then there's a certain level that you have to travel for. There are
no hepatologists, which is a liver specialist in the Rogue
Valley, where I live, at all. So when I got this diagnosis,
I, I remembered that a close friend of mine worked in liver
transplant at UCSF in California, in San Francisco. And so
I contacted her. She quickly had me contact
(12:54):
a hepatologist that she worked with. And I didn't have out
of network insurance. I could only stay in Oregon. This woman, Dr.
Lai, she is kind of my savior. She. She consulted with
me for free, and she thought about
it. She, you know, looked at the results of everything that I had. And she
said, you know, there seems to be some kind of issue
(13:16):
with blood flow. You really should have your heart
checked for pressures. It could be something
like constrictive pericarditis or something
in that realm. And when she said that,
it, it, it, you know, a light bulb went off in
my mind because in 1990,
(13:38):
34 years ago now, I had a case of
acute pericarditis, which meant that my
pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds your heart and protects your heart,
became inflamed, probably from a virus.
We don't know. I was traveling an overnight train in Spain,
coming from. I had been In Morocco. And while
(14:01):
trying to sleep, my chest started to close down, my
breathing started to get painful, and so I hopped
off the bed and I walked back and forth in the train
like I would do if I was, you know, spinning from too much alcohol or
something and just try to bear down and get through it. But it just kept
getting worse and worse. So we got off the train prematurely in
(14:23):
Barcelona, went to a hospital, and that's where
eventually they discovered that I had what they
said was acute pericarditis. I'd never heard of that before. And they said they
couldn't really do anything but give me ibuprofen and rest.
And eventually left the hospital, went home to New York.
This was. I was so fatigued after that for a few weeks.
(14:45):
It was. It was really monumental thing. I remember very, very clearly. But
after that, I forgot about it. Hmm. Completely forgot about. Didn't.
Didn't follow up with any Doctors. I was 21 years
old. And so the rest of my life up
until now, what probably happened was the inflammation
and the response to the inflammation started to calcify the
(15:08):
pericardium, harden it to. To what that the surgeon
would describe as bone level
calcification. No way. And,
yeah, it's like breaking it off, you know, like, and
literally cracking it off of my heart. Some of it was
so. Was. Was deeply intertwined
(15:29):
with the heart muscle, and so that part couldn't come off. So
this is now we're talking about your open heart surgery? That's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the. So she.
She was like. I emailed her back and said,
wow, you know, I had this thing, cute pair card is. And
she. And she responded to me. She was like, wow. I was. I was even
(15:51):
a little hesitant to say that to you because it was such an out there,
even know, kind of textbook diagnosis that you would do in a. In
a class or something like that. It's not something you really see in. In
reality. And you know, from there that was. There
were a bunch of tests had to happen. After that, we had all my
care moved up to OHSU in Portland, you know, where I had
(16:12):
a catheterization to check the pressures in the heart. I had a
heart MRI to, you know,
to really just make sure that this was what was going on.
And the only treatment for it is surgery, which is
a. Called a pericardiectomy. Okay, so hang on.
Before we get to the pericardiectomy, when you did
(16:34):
all those heart tests in Portland, did they all
show that your. Your heart needed some serious Help. They all
showed exactly what she said. Constrictive
pericarditis. So what it is, if you think about it,
it's just instead of that pericardium being flexible
and when your heart beats it, it moves with it. It's
(16:55):
now hard, so your heart doesn't have as much
space to open and close. Okay.
So what it does, what you see on a
catheterization, from my understanding, is you see
a certain pressure signal so that when the beat comes in and goes
out, normal thing would run rise and fall in a particular way,
(17:17):
and this would rise and fall in a different way. And they call that
like a square root sign. And it, you know, mine
was textbook. That. Very clearly
that. And also the, the, the MRI very
clearly showed this calcification. Also,
years ago, because I have a lot of heart issues
(17:40):
in my family, I had what's called a calcium test,
which is a CT scan that everybody should actually have.
It's very inexpensive, it's not covered by insurance, but it
costs a couple hundred dollars, maybe two or three hundred dollars, and it tells you
about the calcification in your arteries and it gives you a sense of, like,
how dangerous your situation is, you know, for, for heart
(18:03):
disease in general. But the, the cardiologist who I met in,
at OHSU in Portland showed me the pictures from that calcium
test, which nobody had showed me the years before that I had taken
it. He said, yeah, there's some calcium in your arteries, but look at the, look
at your pericardium. It was, it was thickened and it was.
The calcium was all, all in there. And nobody had
(18:25):
ever said anything about that to me. Was it in the report?
It said, in the report, it said something like, yeah,
pericardial calcifications, but didn't say it in any way
that made it sound dangerous. That I had a. I
think I had an echocardiogram 20 years ago
that also came back with some pericardial
(18:47):
calcification. Nobody ever made a
deal about it. I never thought about it until now. So all of the, all
of the tests were very clear in suggesting this is what it
was. You're not the first person, and even myself,
everyone I've had the honor and privilege of interviewing for this
podcast. Almost every single person, if they
(19:08):
do read their report, you know, the report is usually not
sounding alarms. It's just reporting facts of what the radiologist
sees. But then the cardiologist
usually doesn't get excited
or is overly incentivized to, to
educate us on what is found in a Radiology report. And so
(19:30):
what I always say, and I think you would agree here, it's
don't take our doctor's word for it, like go back and read our own
reports and then ask questions. You know, like, Dr.
Google can get us into trouble and it can
dysregulate us. So you need to be able to go and
like research what these terms mean from like a grounded,
(19:52):
calm nervous system. Because there can be things on
Dr. Google that can be scary. So it's a fine line
of, of educating ourselves, but then not overly educating
and jump to the conclusion that we're going to die tomorrow.
Well, let me tell you about chat, Dr. Chatgpt.
Ah. Because what I did with all of my test
(20:15):
results that came in is I fed them into this AI chatgpt
and it would, it would come back with like all the, like
act very specific recommendations about
what this could possibly be. Right? So when you look things up on Google,
obviously you get these very broad issues,
right? You could be dying from this, that and the other thing.
(20:37):
ChatGPT like looks at the lab tests and say, well, these lab tests suggest
that it could be this or it could be that. And then, you know, put
more, put more information and more information, more information. So it
definitely helped me push my local GI
to help me get a liver biopsy, which she was
actually weirdly reticent to do
(20:59):
because it kept telling me, you know, you might have cirrhosis, you
might not. The, the elastography is not the, the last
word on this. The gold standard is to get a piece of your
liver basically, and, and see what that says. And so we did that.
The good. Yeah, the good news with that just, by the way, is that
that came back a step lower than cirrhosis. That came back
(21:22):
saying I had maybe like level three as opposed to four,
which still bad, but not really on the edge of liver
failure, which I was thought it might be for a few weeks.
Right. Wow. Well, thanks for connecting the dots. And so,
yeah, bring us to the day of heart surgery. Like, this is just
amazing. So here you are in Portland. Yeah, so I would. So I
(21:44):
drove back. So Portland's about four and a half hour drive from where I live.
I went up and back to Portland probably six
times in, you know, a few months to meet with
the first with the cardiologist, then with the surgeon,
then with the surgeon again. I was a little afraid
to have the surgery at ohsu because
(22:07):
pericardiectomies are very rare or somewhat
rare. So even at a place like ohsu where
they do heart transplants, they only do a handful of
pericardiectomies a year. So I was looking
to, I was talking to the Mayo Clinic, I was
talking to the Cleveland Clinic. These places do
(22:29):
them on a regular basis. This would require me to get
different insurance. So I was going to have to wait till the, after
the beginning of the year after my catheterization,
which was in November, they called
me somewhere around Thanksgiving and said,
you know, surgery, we're scheduling you for surgery on the 12th of
(22:51):
December, which was like two weeks away, you know, a little more than two weeks
away. And, and I had been investigating these other
path. So I really, I was a little nervous. But on the way
to. From my last consult with Dr. Tobias,
who was my surgery surgeon, I talked to another
doctor, Dr. Greason at the, at the Mayo Clinic, who
(23:13):
is like one of the foremost surgeons for this type of surgery
in the country. And he was very kind, very generous with his time
and, and, you know, led me to understand,
after peppering him with as many questions as I could, that I
was going to be okay at OHSU with, with this doctor.
And then that was, that was just a week before
(23:34):
the surgery. I met with that doctor again, asked him a few more questions,
and then we were a go for surgery. The same year that
I had the cardioversion
to start with. Luckily for me, this, you know,
from an insurance point of view, I had already reached my out of pocket maximum.
This surgery was now going to be paid for. And then it was just
(23:57):
preparing for surgery. And, and I had already been doing that a bit by
listening to your podcast, which I found extremely helpful to,
you know, to, to listen to other people's stories, your
story, and understand how people prepare and
what could happen afterwards. Some of which on your story
was, was concerning and, you know, the wires
(24:19):
is what. Is what comes to mind, having to
have those taken out. And then I also downloaded
these on the request of my stepmother who was
with my father at that Dr. Oz surgery. She told me about
these guided meditations. I'll have to
look up that one's name. But I did these guided meditations
(24:42):
about, you know, the week or two before
the surgery, which just were all about getting the nervous
system to relax, to trust the
surgery and the surgical team. Her name is Bella Ruth.
Oh, yep. I use Bella Ruth Nappersteck as well. She's quite the name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those were, those were really
(25:04):
profound for some people. Might be a little New agey
sounding and it's very soothing kind of thing. But from. I found that to
be quite remarkable. I went into the
surgery as calm as I could possibly be. I
really had. I surrendered to the whole thing, which is
a practice that I, you know, work with people on in my, in my own
(25:26):
coaching practice, which is radical acceptance and
surrender, which is just recognizing this is happening now
I can either resist it, you know, and suffer, or
I can let go into it and, you know, let
my body handle it. Yeah. So that, that
led up to the 12th of December in 2023, which is
(25:48):
when I had seven hour surgery and I was on the five
hours. Yeah, they got to go in there
and scrape this thing off piece by piece all around your
heart, you know. You know, what I'm envisioning right now
is like a raw egg and
the surgeon's trying to chip away at just the shell because you say it
(26:10):
was so calcified and then the yolk is your heart.
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. So when.
So on the heart by heart lung bypass machine, you know, the heart stops
so it's easier to do that. But obviously there's dangers being on the heart
bypass machine. And that was some of the stuff I was very concerned about because
yeah, there's post surgical issues with
(26:32):
cognitive pump head. They call it pump head.
Okay. Yeah. So I was afraid of all of that and it went
off without a hitch, I guess. And you know, here I am,
obviously to tell the story, dude, seven
hours. I think seven hours. Besides my dad,
my dad's quintuple bypass was eight hours. And I think
(26:55):
you're now my like, yeah, you're. You win number number two
for, sorry, really long heart surgeries. Geez.
I just, I'm just taking a minute to take all that in because it. I
have so many questions, but it's just a lot to take in.
Thank you to your liver for letting us know that you needed
help for sure. And thank you to that amazing hepatologist that
(27:17):
helped you connect the dots. And thank you to you who was
incessant in asking questions and not
accepting, you know, these answers that didn't resonate with
you. And I think that's a really big.
I'm taking so much away from our conversation today already. But
that's. That just continues to drive home for me and
(27:39):
hopefully those listening that like our intuitions are
everything. We are in the driver's seat of our health
care and if something doesn't feel right, we have
the right to continue to pursue
other avenues. And that's what you did, thankfully. A hundred
percent. Yeah, 100%. And. And from this
(28:01):
experience, I recognize the, you know, the dislocated nature
of our healthcare system. Unless you're in like a managed care facility
of some kind like Kaiser back in California, you have
to make some leaps sometimes between, you know, your
local person and a specialist and then maybe,
you know, a distant hospital, and that's on
(28:24):
you. Basically. They'll make a referral, but that will just get lost
a lot of times. And so pushing through the medical
system gently but firmly and calling back and
calling back and calling back, and you think you might be bothering people,
but they're busy and they need to. They need to realize
that, that you need help and you could slip
(28:46):
through their cracks. And it's really, really important. I would just, for
anybody listening to push pretty hard when
you know that you need something. Yes. And I had to do the same.
And I'm having flashbacks of
how tiring it was to pick up
the phone when my heart had any. Had hardly any
(29:09):
juice left. I mean, it was so under oxygenated and here I'm
still having to pound the pavement. And, you know, it was
interesting and it doesn't seem like you had this
mindset, but I had to really tune out my
loved ones who said, just be patient. Wait, let them
come to you. And I was like, no, I can tell
(29:30):
I don't have much time left. And it's
hard to find the courage, but you have
to. To tune out what? We've kind of been
conditioned to believe that we aren't allowed to be in the driver's
seat, that we aren't allowed to be the squeaky wheel. But you're right.
I mean, especially in today's health care system. Post
(29:52):
Covid. Yeah, everyone's tired, everything's
understaffed. So it really is on us
to. To be in the driver's seat and get us to where
we need to go. There's a difference between, you know, being
a hypochondriac and then not knowing what you're really
need and not knowing what's going on. But when you know
(30:14):
that, that you have something going on, you need the help.
You know, driving towards that. That help is, Is
everything. Yes. Yes. So in the moments
we have left, we, you, you're, you're.
Obviously you made it through your surgery. And
what date was your surgery? It was December 12,
(30:36):
2023. Okay. Yeah. It was about six. Six weeks later,
driving up to Ohsu to meet with the cardiologists when I
decided that I would start Training for the Mount Ashland Hill
climb. This half marathon thaw up a mile
from my town to the top of Mount Ashland. Because I hadn't been.
Nobody called me from cardiac, you know, physical therapy or
(30:58):
whatever they call that. I forget. Cardiac rehab.
Cardiac rehab. We tried a bunch of times to get in touch with them and
I just couldn't. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to do my
own cardiac rehab and I'm going to do this thing
because I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it again if I
don't do it now. And you know, that started,
started this, this sensation and the feeling of, of time
(31:21):
and life being very, very precious and, you know,
to, to really decide what you want to do, what I want
to do and not let fear and,
you know, disbelief get in the way of me doing, doing things.
So I started training for this, this thing that I would do
six months after surgery, which I didn't know if I could actually do or would
(31:44):
actually make it. But I started running in the dark
and the cold in February. And you know, at 6:00 in the morning, I would
go out to a track and walk around, you
know, halfway around, stop or whatever and eventually
maybe jog around a little bit, you know, eventually,
week by week, day by day, working up to, to this
(32:06):
big summiting of this mountain in four hours from the bottom,
from the, from our town to the top of this mountain. It was quite, quite
the experience. And so you did it, you, you did the half
marathon? I did that, yeah. January, I mean, on June
8, which was my daughter's birthday, she wasn't happy about that at all, but she
met me up to, at the top and did the last, the last
(32:28):
mile, which is the steepest mile up the ski mountain to Mount
Ashland. And yeah, I did that. And
I'm continuing to run and I get up in the morning still.
Now it's getting dark again, doing, running in the dark. And that was one
of the things I could never do before the surgery that I didn't
know why I could never run long
(32:50):
distances. And now I can do 4, 8, 10, 12
miles without thinking about it too much. A whole new lease on
life. It's like your heart has so much room now. It's just like,
yes, it's totally. And I really felt that for
a while, really. And I can still feel like I can most
of the time feel my heart beating into my chest just because
(33:12):
it has so much room now to
expand. How has this changed you? Spiritually well, it
has definitely given me this sense
of the preciousness of life. Right. It's really
just I had, you know, I worked on this
myself in the past. I think about death
(33:33):
maybe more than the average person. You know, I work in health care.
My friend died of cancer last year.
It has brought me even more into the
present, into the present moment. And
it's as though I feel like a demand on my
system, you know, for whatever. Whatever it is that wants to be
(33:56):
expressed as me, through me in this life is
much clearer and definitely feels demanding about
it. So there's more of me that I'm getting out of the
way and allowing this to, to come through as clearly as
possible. So it's like this open heart surgery is
brought clarity. It opened my heart, you know, in a certain
(34:17):
way. You know, my heart was always the guiding
source for me, you know, when I had those skip beats, you know, 25 years
ago or whatever, and always feeling into my heart to try to understand
what it is that I want. And my heart was constricted,
literally constricted. Right. And so what was that doing to me
psychologically, what was that doing to me spiritually? It's hard to
(34:41):
exactly say, but there's definitely this sense of, of
unburdenedness and openness
and possibility. And like I said, there's this kind of
sense that some, you know, everything that I've thought about
wanting to do or, you know, whether it's with work or with
life or, you know, the community, like I, I gotta
(35:03):
do, because there's not infinite amount of time
here. What's one piece of advice
you want to give to heart patients coming after you? Well, I would
definitely say, you know, bottom line is we should all be regulating
our nervous systems, you know, really, really understanding
and working with this part of us that is
(35:25):
deciding for us really whether we're safe or whether
we're in danger and trying to get past a lot of
what we experience as danger, which really isn't, you know, and,
and then, and then being able over time with some
regulation, with some strengthening, to be able to actually deal with the
actual danger when it comes. Right. So that you don't overdo
(35:48):
it. Most people, I notice,
are overreacting in their lives to
the just incredible amount of stimulus coming in into our
systems every single day. All the information, you know, all the issues
around politics or world issues and
wars and, you know, down to our bank accounts
(36:09):
and paying rent and, you know, dealing with our loved
ones. Right. All of this stuff creates this sense that we're in
danger and our, we're, our nervous systems are hyped up
too, too often for too long. And so getting ourselves to
relax, to learn how to breathe properly, to strengthen our
bodies and to, to be able to root in, in a sense of,
(36:32):
of, of peace and ease will
help any of us not become hard patients, number one. And then if
you are a heart patient, help, help soothe and heal.
And when we relax, when we get that nervous system to relax, that's when our
body repairs itself and our, our body and mind can
connect and rejuvenate. Beautiful.
(36:53):
And how do we find you? How can
listeners find you? Because you help people with this. Yeah. So I
work directly with people on this. You can go directly to my website,
jeremyrothenberg.com I also have a channel on
Insight Timer. I teach meditation, lead meditations. So
I think that's insidetimer.com Jeremy Rothenberg and
(37:16):
we can include, I guess links. I'll have all that in the show notes for
listeners. Great. Yeah. So I offer people free
coaching sessions when they're available and we can have
a 30 minute talk about what's going on for you and give you some free
coaching and see what's available for you.
Wow. Incredible. I hope listeners will take you up on that because
(37:38):
you are just an absolute joy to speak with and, and I
so appreciate your willingness to be vulnerable and
be seen, be heard and share your story because none
of us have to go through this alone. And I know that
your story of hope, inspiration and healing will help many others.
So thank you, Jeremy. Thank you so much. It's great talking to you. I really
(38:00):
enjoyed it and you've heard it here. You will find Jeremy
Rothenberg in the show Notes. Please do consider reaching out
to him. And if you have never used Insight Timer, I
love it. It is such a great tool
and there are so many different like options on there to
listen to Jeremy. They have just like singing bowls
(38:22):
and I don't know, it's like all kinds of bells and whistles that can help
us through kind of the interesting time we find ourselves in here on
planet Earth. So thank you so much for joining. Joining
us today with open heart surgery with boots. Please be sure to come back next
week. I've got another episode queued up for you.
I know you're going to love it. Until then, I love you.
(38:44):
Your heart is your best friend.
When she said that, a light bulb went off in my mind because in
1990, 34 years ago now,
I had a case of acute pericarditis, which meant
that my pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds your heart and
protects your heart, became inflamed, probably from a
virus. We don't know. I was traveling. I was on
(00:24):
an overnight train in Spain, coming from. I had been in
Morocco, and while trying to sleep, my chest started
to close down, my breathing started to get painful,
and so I hopped off the bed and I walked back and forth in
the train like I would do if I was spinning
from too much alcohol or something and just try to bear down and get
(00:46):
through it. But it just kept getting worse and worse.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode
of Open Heart Surgery with Boots. Oh, my gosh.
We are coming up on the two year anniversary of when I even had
this idea of starting a podcast for open
heart surgery. And hilariously, I didn't even listen to
(01:08):
podcasts, and it just kind of came to me like this
existential nudge. And here
I am two years later, and what you don't
see is Michael Mori, who is my engineer in the
background, who helps me edit these episodes.
And I think I'm making his job easier because I'm saying less
(01:30):
ums. So thank you for sticking with
me all this time and thank you for continuing to come back.
Please do consider supporting this podcast on Patreon. You
can find the links in the show notes. This is definitely not
done for free, and I have been so happy and
honored to keep this podcast going. But it does feel
(01:52):
good when I see support coming from willing
donors. And if you sign up for the second or third
tier, then you get to be a part of the Zoom community, which
I'm just now getting going. So be sure to go check that out. And
you will absolutely make my year if you become a Patreon
supporter. But, oh, my goodness. Enough jabbering.
(02:15):
Let's get to today's episode with Jeremy Rothenberg. Jeremy,
welcome. You're coming to us from Ashland, Oregon,
and I could not be more tickled to have you. And you
are, my gosh, I think my second or third friend that I've made actually
through substack, so substack for the win.
Nice. Jeremy, will you please introduce
(02:37):
yourself and kind of set the scene of, like, who you are,
what you're about. You have overcome an incredible
story that I have never heard of before. So I'm even more excited
about that. I mean, I'm not Excited about what happened to you, but I'm excited
to have your story on the podcast. But first, set the
scene of who Jeremy Rothenberg is. Oh, thank you.
(03:00):
So happy to be here and talk to you after listening to you for so
long. Who I am. I am an
acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist, and I'm
also a wellness coach. I sometimes call myself an
executive wellness coach because I work with executives
and creative professionals and mostly in the tech industry. We're. Once
(03:21):
upon a time, I used to work and I live in
Ashland, Oregon. Moved here about six years ago
from Oakland, the Bay Area and California, where
I had an acupuncture practice for 10 years and before that
did about 15 years doing various types of producing and
product managing in the. In the. In the tech industry. Yeah. Do you want me
(03:43):
to go on from there or. Well, I just gotta say, that's quite the
pivot. Yeah. Well, this. This all plays.
Plays nicely in, in this whole story. Just very briefly
on that. You know, working in that world, I
felt that I wasn't really doing what I was meant to
be doing in life. Even though I liked it. It was. It was fun,
(04:06):
smart people. I was making a good amount of money. I always felt drained,
and I always felt like I was losing energy rather than gaining
energy. And at one point, I had an
experience where I started having panic attacks after
having my heart starting to skip a beat.
So one day. I'll just tell a quick story. One day I was
(04:28):
working a small job as a favor for my
cousin over the Christmas holiday, and I was
qaing back then, what was CD
ROMs know like
for? Yeah, and. And it was such a. It was
such a repetitive job that I really wasn't that happy
(04:50):
about doing, but I was. I was doing it anyway. And I. My. I felt
my heart started to skip beats and it.
It like threw me into a panic attack. Why? Because weeks before
that, I had just come home from visiting my father on the
east coast after he had quintuple bypass
surgery with Dr. Oz. And yes, it's
(05:12):
that Dr. Oz what he was back. Back then when he
was still a top cardiac surgeon in New York
before he became the character that you know him as.
And my father had quintuple bypass surgery, which is
like, I think as many as you can possibly have. And I had these
skipped beats and suddenly something came in my mind that something was wrong with
(05:35):
my heart. And I had these panic attacks which led
to me working briefly with an energy healer
who set me completely at ease Set my
heart completely at ease. And I realized, you know what,
two things here. One, I have to learn to do what he did.
And number two, I have to do what I know that I'm supposed to be
(05:57):
doing in life, which is helping people and working directly
with the mind and the body rather than on
these interactive products, you know, that I, that I was
working on for in the tech industry. That was the beginning of this
story, to be quite honest, because it will come back, we'll come back to understand
that those immediate, those skipped beats were a
(06:20):
result of something that led to the surgery that I had last
year. And I'm still stuck on Dr. Oz. I honestly forgot
he was, he was. Actually a top
surgeon, I believe, at Columbia Presbyterian
in New York City. I'm gonna have to dig into that separately.
He. He really. Okay, that's for another time.
(06:42):
That's. Yeah. So it's just an interesting thing. Yeah.
So, okay, yeah, you've set the scene, but like, give us the
big overarching picture of. Well, first of all, how old are
you? So I'm 55 years old now. That was
back in 2001 or
2002, when I first started feeling these
(07:04):
heart related symptoms that I just.
And I had those checked out and they were checked out to be normal. They
were called PVCs, premature ventricular contractions.
People have them. It wasn't considered an
issue. It was only, only looking back 20 years now that I
realized that maybe they had something to do with this issue
(07:26):
of my pericardium. Yeah. Which, which. That's the great
segue into giving us the big picture of. Give us
the 50,000 foot view. And then we're going to go back and connect
some dots and help the listeners understand your
process. Yeah. So last year, well, In
August of 2023, I was
(07:48):
diagnosed with liver cirrhosis, which
was as astonishing as it could possibly be because I didn't
have any symptoms of liver
cirrhosis. And I was only
investigating my liver because
a year before that I started having atrial
(08:09):
fibrillation. And atrial fibrillation is when the atrium of your
heart start to beat wildly. And
it's usually not a life threatening situation, but
it can cause blood clots, which can cause stroke. So there
is concern about it. I tripped into
atrial fibrillation two weeks before my daughter's bat
(08:31):
mitzvah in, in 2023
and didn't come out of it for three
months. Because I live in a small town, I
couldn't get to see a cardiologist for Three months. And because
I was in pretty good shape, it didn't really affect me that much. The only
reason why I knew that I had the atrial fibrillation is because my apple watch
(08:53):
told me I did. You know, it alerted me and said, you have atrial fibrillation.
I started measuring everything and I realized, oh, my. My
resting heart rate is now 30 beats above what it was
before. And when I exercise, everything goes about 30 beats higher
than it did before. So I ha. I eventually had to get a
cardio version, which is a shock, like a defibrillator, but in a,
(09:15):
you know, in a surgical environment. And I did that.
January 2024. And that's reset my heart
rhythm. And that was great. And I talked to my cardiologist and I said,
hey, many years ago, I was tested for life
insurance, and they came back with the blood test,
and everything was normal except this one liver enzyme called
(09:36):
ggt, which they normally don't test for. But when
it's high, mine was kind of off the charts high. When it's high, it can
signal that you might be an alcoholic or you might have some, like,
bile duct issues. So the life insurance people are.
That's. They cut you out. And I was shocked about that.
And I talked for. To doctors, any doctor I would see over the next
(09:58):
bunch of years, I would ask about that. And they all kind of shrugged their
shoulders and they're like, well, if everything else is normal, your alt ast,
the other liver enzymes, which are normally checked, they're normal. It's probably just
who you are. You probably just have a weird GGT level. And so
I went on with my life. Never didn't really think about it too
much. But I asked my cardiologist at this point, I said, you know, I
(10:20):
have this high GGT thing. Could this have anything to do with my atrial
fibrillation? And she said, well, she didn't know. She did some
tests, came back, everything came back negative. She sent, then sent
me to a GI people, and I had coordinated
my cardio version to be at the beginning of the year so that I could
use up my deductible immediately so that I could,
(10:41):
you know, use my insurance that year as much as possible. And so
my deductible was up. I said, okay, I'll go do a bunch of lab tests.
That's fine. And so I went to see a GI person,
went through all these lab tests. Some of them started coming back a little off.
Had an ultrasound of the liver or of the
abdomen. And that said, like, you know, there were some blood flow issues in the
(11:02):
liver, so we did something called a
elastography ultrasound, which measures the. The
flexibility and the density of, of an organ. So
that was. Say that again, slower elast.
Elastography, like elastic
elastography. I've never heard of that. I hadn't
either. And. And that comes back with a scale of
(11:25):
zero to four for liver fibrosis, four
being cirrhosis. Liver cirrhosis. Mine came back at
four. And I remember, you know, reading that
result at my kitchen table and just my jaw
dropping to the floor. This is weeks after a very, very
close friend of mine died from cancer. And I was like,
(11:47):
wow, my turn. And
that was shocking. Absolutely shocking roller coaster
because why would you have liver cirrhosis?
Right? I was not an alcoholic. I generally
eat a, you know, healthy, generally low carb
diet. There's no way I had a fatty liver or anything like that.
(12:09):
So we assumed that it must be like some kind of autoimmune
disease. We checked for autoimmune hepatitis,
hepatitis, anything under the sun. All of it came back a little
inconclusive, but mostly, mostly negative.
And interestingly, where I live. Right, you don't. The. What
I found out is you have a certain level of medical availability
(12:31):
here, and then there's a certain level that you have to travel for. There are
no hepatologists, which is a liver specialist in the Rogue
Valley, where I live, at all. So when I got this diagnosis,
I, I remembered that a close friend of mine worked in liver
transplant at UCSF in California, in San Francisco. And so
I contacted her. She quickly had me contact
(12:54):
a hepatologist that she worked with. And I didn't have out
of network insurance. I could only stay in Oregon. This woman, Dr.
Lai, she is kind of my savior. She. She consulted with
me for free, and she thought about
it. She, you know, looked at the results of everything that I had. And she
said, you know, there seems to be some kind of issue
(13:16):
with blood flow. You really should have your heart
checked for pressures. It could be something
like constrictive pericarditis or something
in that realm. And when she said that,
it, it, it, you know, a light bulb went off in
my mind because in 1990,
(13:38):
34 years ago now, I had a case of
acute pericarditis, which meant that my
pericardium, which is the sac that surrounds your heart and protects your heart,
became inflamed, probably from a virus.
We don't know. I was traveling an overnight train in Spain,
coming from. I had been In Morocco. And while
(14:01):
trying to sleep, my chest started to close down, my
breathing started to get painful, and so I hopped
off the bed and I walked back and forth in the train
like I would do if I was, you know, spinning from too much alcohol or
something and just try to bear down and get through it. But it just kept
getting worse and worse. So we got off the train prematurely in
(14:23):
Barcelona, went to a hospital, and that's where
eventually they discovered that I had what they
said was acute pericarditis. I'd never heard of that before. And they said they
couldn't really do anything but give me ibuprofen and rest.
And eventually left the hospital, went home to New York.
This was. I was so fatigued after that for a few weeks.
(14:45):
It was. It was really monumental thing. I remember very, very clearly. But
after that, I forgot about it. Hmm. Completely forgot about. Didn't.
Didn't follow up with any Doctors. I was 21 years
old. And so the rest of my life up
until now, what probably happened was the inflammation
and the response to the inflammation started to calcify the
(15:08):
pericardium, harden it to. To what that the surgeon
would describe as bone level
calcification. No way. And,
yeah, it's like breaking it off, you know, like, and
literally cracking it off of my heart. Some of it was
so. Was. Was deeply intertwined
(15:29):
with the heart muscle, and so that part couldn't come off. So
this is now we're talking about your open heart surgery? That's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the. So she.
She was like. I emailed her back and said,
wow, you know, I had this thing, cute pair card is. And
she. And she responded to me. She was like, wow. I was. I was even
(15:51):
a little hesitant to say that to you because it was such an out there,
even know, kind of textbook diagnosis that you would do in a. In
a class or something like that. It's not something you really see in. In
reality. And you know, from there that was. There
were a bunch of tests had to happen. After that, we had all my
care moved up to OHSU in Portland, you know, where I had
(16:12):
a catheterization to check the pressures in the heart. I had a
heart MRI to, you know,
to really just make sure that this was what was going on.
And the only treatment for it is surgery, which is
a. Called a pericardiectomy. Okay, so hang on.
Before we get to the pericardiectomy, when you did
(16:34):
all those heart tests in Portland, did they all
show that your. Your heart needed some serious Help. They all
showed exactly what she said. Constrictive
pericarditis. So what it is, if you think about it,
it's just instead of that pericardium being flexible
and when your heart beats it, it moves with it. It's
(16:55):
now hard, so your heart doesn't have as much
space to open and close. Okay.
So what it does, what you see on a
catheterization, from my understanding, is you see
a certain pressure signal so that when the beat comes in and goes
out, normal thing would run rise and fall in a particular way,
(17:17):
and this would rise and fall in a different way. And they call that
like a square root sign. And it, you know, mine
was textbook. That. Very clearly
that. And also the, the, the MRI very
clearly showed this calcification. Also,
years ago, because I have a lot of heart issues
(17:40):
in my family, I had what's called a calcium test,
which is a CT scan that everybody should actually have.
It's very inexpensive, it's not covered by insurance, but it
costs a couple hundred dollars, maybe two or three hundred dollars, and it tells you
about the calcification in your arteries and it gives you a sense of, like,
how dangerous your situation is, you know, for, for heart
(18:03):
disease in general. But the, the cardiologist who I met in,
at OHSU in Portland showed me the pictures from that calcium
test, which nobody had showed me the years before that I had taken
it. He said, yeah, there's some calcium in your arteries, but look at the, look
at your pericardium. It was, it was thickened and it was.
The calcium was all, all in there. And nobody had
(18:25):
ever said anything about that to me. Was it in the report?
It said, in the report, it said something like, yeah,
pericardial calcifications, but didn't say it in any way
that made it sound dangerous. That I had a. I
think I had an echocardiogram 20 years ago
that also came back with some pericardial
(18:47):
calcification. Nobody ever made a
deal about it. I never thought about it until now. So all of the, all
of the tests were very clear in suggesting this is what it
was. You're not the first person, and even myself,
everyone I've had the honor and privilege of interviewing for this
podcast. Almost every single person, if they
(19:08):
do read their report, you know, the report is usually not
sounding alarms. It's just reporting facts of what the radiologist
sees. But then the cardiologist
usually doesn't get excited
or is overly incentivized to, to
educate us on what is found in a Radiology report. And so
(19:30):
what I always say, and I think you would agree here, it's
don't take our doctor's word for it, like go back and read our own
reports and then ask questions. You know, like, Dr.
Google can get us into trouble and it can
dysregulate us. So you need to be able to go and
like research what these terms mean from like a grounded,
(19:52):
calm nervous system. Because there can be things on
Dr. Google that can be scary. So it's a fine line
of, of educating ourselves, but then not overly educating
and jump to the conclusion that we're going to die tomorrow.
Well, let me tell you about chat, Dr. Chatgpt.
Ah. Because what I did with all of my test
(20:15):
results that came in is I fed them into this AI chatgpt
and it would, it would come back with like all the, like
act very specific recommendations about
what this could possibly be. Right? So when you look things up on Google,
obviously you get these very broad issues,
right? You could be dying from this, that and the other thing.
(20:37):
ChatGPT like looks at the lab tests and say, well, these lab tests suggest
that it could be this or it could be that. And then, you know, put
more, put more information and more information, more information. So it
definitely helped me push my local GI
to help me get a liver biopsy, which she was
actually weirdly reticent to do
(20:59):
because it kept telling me, you know, you might have cirrhosis, you
might not. The, the elastography is not the, the last
word on this. The gold standard is to get a piece of your
liver basically, and, and see what that says. And so we did that.
The good. Yeah, the good news with that just, by the way, is that
that came back a step lower than cirrhosis. That came back
(21:22):
saying I had maybe like level three as opposed to four,
which still bad, but not really on the edge of liver
failure, which I was thought it might be for a few weeks.
Right. Wow. Well, thanks for connecting the dots. And so,
yeah, bring us to the day of heart surgery. Like, this is just
amazing. So here you are in Portland. Yeah, so I would. So I
(21:44):
drove back. So Portland's about four and a half hour drive from where I live.
I went up and back to Portland probably six
times in, you know, a few months to meet with
the first with the cardiologist, then with the surgeon,
then with the surgeon again. I was a little afraid
to have the surgery at ohsu because
(22:07):
pericardiectomies are very rare or somewhat
rare. So even at a place like ohsu where
they do heart transplants, they only do a handful of
pericardiectomies a year. So I was looking
to, I was talking to the Mayo Clinic, I was
talking to the Cleveland Clinic. These places do
(22:29):
them on a regular basis. This would require me to get
different insurance. So I was going to have to wait till the, after
the beginning of the year after my catheterization,
which was in November, they called
me somewhere around Thanksgiving and said,
you know, surgery, we're scheduling you for surgery on the 12th of
(22:51):
December, which was like two weeks away, you know, a little more than two weeks
away. And, and I had been investigating these other
path. So I really, I was a little nervous. But on the way
to. From my last consult with Dr. Tobias,
who was my surgery surgeon, I talked to another
doctor, Dr. Greason at the, at the Mayo Clinic, who
(23:13):
is like one of the foremost surgeons for this type of surgery
in the country. And he was very kind, very generous with his time
and, and, you know, led me to understand,
after peppering him with as many questions as I could, that I
was going to be okay at OHSU with, with this doctor.
And then that was, that was just a week before
(23:34):
the surgery. I met with that doctor again, asked him a few more questions,
and then we were a go for surgery. The same year that
I had the cardioversion
to start with. Luckily for me, this, you know,
from an insurance point of view, I had already reached my out of pocket maximum.
This surgery was now going to be paid for. And then it was just
(23:57):
preparing for surgery. And, and I had already been doing that a bit by
listening to your podcast, which I found extremely helpful to,
you know, to, to listen to other people's stories, your
story, and understand how people prepare and
what could happen afterwards. Some of which on your story
was, was concerning and, you know, the wires
(24:19):
is what. Is what comes to mind, having to
have those taken out. And then I also downloaded
these on the request of my stepmother who was
with my father at that Dr. Oz surgery. She told me about
these guided meditations. I'll have to
look up that one's name. But I did these guided meditations
(24:42):
about, you know, the week or two before
the surgery, which just were all about getting the nervous
system to relax, to trust the
surgery and the surgical team. Her name is Bella Ruth.
Oh, yep. I use Bella Ruth Nappersteck as well. She's quite the name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those were, those were really
(25:04):
profound for some people. Might be a little New agey
sounding and it's very soothing kind of thing. But from. I found that to
be quite remarkable. I went into the
surgery as calm as I could possibly be. I
really had. I surrendered to the whole thing, which is
a practice that I, you know, work with people on in my, in my own
(25:26):
coaching practice, which is radical acceptance and
surrender, which is just recognizing this is happening now
I can either resist it, you know, and suffer, or
I can let go into it and, you know, let
my body handle it. Yeah. So that, that
led up to the 12th of December in 2023, which is
(25:48):
when I had seven hour surgery and I was on the five
hours. Yeah, they got to go in there
and scrape this thing off piece by piece all around your
heart, you know. You know, what I'm envisioning right now
is like a raw egg and
the surgeon's trying to chip away at just the shell because you say it
(26:10):
was so calcified and then the yolk is your heart.
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. So when.
So on the heart by heart lung bypass machine, you know, the heart stops
so it's easier to do that. But obviously there's dangers being on the heart
bypass machine. And that was some of the stuff I was very concerned about because
yeah, there's post surgical issues with
(26:32):
cognitive pump head. They call it pump head.
Okay. Yeah. So I was afraid of all of that and it went
off without a hitch, I guess. And you know, here I am,
obviously to tell the story, dude, seven
hours. I think seven hours. Besides my dad,
my dad's quintuple bypass was eight hours. And I think
(26:55):
you're now my like, yeah, you're. You win number number two
for, sorry, really long heart surgeries. Geez.
I just, I'm just taking a minute to take all that in because it. I
have so many questions, but it's just a lot to take in.
Thank you to your liver for letting us know that you needed
help for sure. And thank you to that amazing hepatologist that
(27:17):
helped you connect the dots. And thank you to you who was
incessant in asking questions and not
accepting, you know, these answers that didn't resonate with
you. And I think that's a really big.
I'm taking so much away from our conversation today already. But
that's. That just continues to drive home for me and
(27:39):
hopefully those listening that like our intuitions are
everything. We are in the driver's seat of our health
care and if something doesn't feel right, we have
the right to continue to pursue
other avenues. And that's what you did, thankfully. A hundred
percent. Yeah, 100%. And. And from this
(28:01):
experience, I recognize the, you know, the dislocated nature
of our healthcare system. Unless you're in like a managed care facility
of some kind like Kaiser back in California, you have
to make some leaps sometimes between, you know, your
local person and a specialist and then maybe,
you know, a distant hospital, and that's on
(28:24):
you. Basically. They'll make a referral, but that will just get lost
a lot of times. And so pushing through the medical
system gently but firmly and calling back and
calling back and calling back, and you think you might be bothering people,
but they're busy and they need to. They need to realize
that, that you need help and you could slip
(28:46):
through their cracks. And it's really, really important. I would just, for
anybody listening to push pretty hard when
you know that you need something. Yes. And I had to do the same.
And I'm having flashbacks of
how tiring it was to pick up
the phone when my heart had any. Had hardly any
(29:09):
juice left. I mean, it was so under oxygenated and here I'm
still having to pound the pavement. And, you know, it was
interesting and it doesn't seem like you had this
mindset, but I had to really tune out my
loved ones who said, just be patient. Wait, let them
come to you. And I was like, no, I can tell
(29:30):
I don't have much time left. And it's
hard to find the courage, but you have
to. To tune out what? We've kind of been
conditioned to believe that we aren't allowed to be in the driver's
seat, that we aren't allowed to be the squeaky wheel. But you're right.
I mean, especially in today's health care system. Post
(29:52):
Covid. Yeah, everyone's tired, everything's
understaffed. So it really is on us
to. To be in the driver's seat and get us to where
we need to go. There's a difference between, you know, being
a hypochondriac and then not knowing what you're really
need and not knowing what's going on. But when you know
(30:14):
that, that you have something going on, you need the help.
You know, driving towards that. That help is, Is
everything. Yes. Yes. So in the moments
we have left, we, you, you're, you're.
Obviously you made it through your surgery. And
what date was your surgery? It was December 12,
(30:36):
2023. Okay. Yeah. It was about six. Six weeks later,
driving up to Ohsu to meet with the cardiologists when I
decided that I would start Training for the Mount Ashland Hill
climb. This half marathon thaw up a mile
from my town to the top of Mount Ashland. Because I hadn't been.
Nobody called me from cardiac, you know, physical therapy or
(30:58):
whatever they call that. I forget. Cardiac rehab.
Cardiac rehab. We tried a bunch of times to get in touch with them and
I just couldn't. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to do my
own cardiac rehab and I'm going to do this thing
because I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it again if I
don't do it now. And you know, that started,
started this, this sensation and the feeling of, of time
(31:21):
and life being very, very precious and, you know,
to, to really decide what you want to do, what I want
to do and not let fear and,
you know, disbelief get in the way of me doing, doing things.
So I started training for this, this thing that I would do
six months after surgery, which I didn't know if I could actually do or would
(31:44):
actually make it. But I started running in the dark
and the cold in February. And you know, at 6:00 in the morning, I would
go out to a track and walk around, you
know, halfway around, stop or whatever and eventually
maybe jog around a little bit, you know, eventually,
week by week, day by day, working up to, to this
(32:06):
big summiting of this mountain in four hours from the bottom,
from the, from our town to the top of this mountain. It was quite, quite
the experience. And so you did it, you, you did the half
marathon? I did that, yeah. January, I mean, on June
8, which was my daughter's birthday, she wasn't happy about that at all, but she
met me up to, at the top and did the last, the last
(32:28):
mile, which is the steepest mile up the ski mountain to Mount
Ashland. And yeah, I did that. And
I'm continuing to run and I get up in the morning still.
Now it's getting dark again, doing, running in the dark. And that was one
of the things I could never do before the surgery that I didn't
know why I could never run long
(32:50):
distances. And now I can do 4, 8, 10, 12
miles without thinking about it too much. A whole new lease on
life. It's like your heart has so much room now. It's just like,
yes, it's totally. And I really felt that for
a while, really. And I can still feel like I can most
of the time feel my heart beating into my chest just because
(33:12):
it has so much room now to
expand. How has this changed you? Spiritually well, it
has definitely given me this sense
of the preciousness of life. Right. It's really
just I had, you know, I worked on this
myself in the past. I think about death
(33:33):
maybe more than the average person. You know, I work in health care.
My friend died of cancer last year.
It has brought me even more into the
present, into the present moment. And
it's as though I feel like a demand on my
system, you know, for whatever. Whatever it is that wants to be
(33:56):
expressed as me, through me in this life is
much clearer and definitely feels demanding about
it. So there's more of me that I'm getting out of the
way and allowing this to, to come through as clearly as
possible. So it's like this open heart surgery is
brought clarity. It opened my heart, you know, in a certain
(34:17):
way. You know, my heart was always the guiding
source for me, you know, when I had those skip beats, you know, 25 years
ago or whatever, and always feeling into my heart to try to understand
what it is that I want. And my heart was constricted,
literally constricted. Right. And so what was that doing to me
psychologically, what was that doing to me spiritually? It's hard to
(34:41):
exactly say, but there's definitely this sense of, of
unburdenedness and openness
and possibility. And like I said, there's this kind of
sense that some, you know, everything that I've thought about
wanting to do or, you know, whether it's with work or with
life or, you know, the community, like I, I gotta
(35:03):
do, because there's not infinite amount of time
here. What's one piece of advice
you want to give to heart patients coming after you? Well, I would
definitely say, you know, bottom line is we should all be regulating
our nervous systems, you know, really, really understanding
and working with this part of us that is
(35:25):
deciding for us really whether we're safe or whether
we're in danger and trying to get past a lot of
what we experience as danger, which really isn't, you know, and,
and then, and then being able over time with some
regulation, with some strengthening, to be able to actually deal with the
actual danger when it comes. Right. So that you don't overdo
(35:48):
it. Most people, I notice,
are overreacting in their lives to
the just incredible amount of stimulus coming in into our
systems every single day. All the information, you know, all the issues
around politics or world issues and
wars and, you know, down to our bank accounts
(36:09):
and paying rent and, you know, dealing with our loved
ones. Right. All of this stuff creates this sense that we're in
danger and our, we're, our nervous systems are hyped up
too, too often for too long. And so getting ourselves to
relax, to learn how to breathe properly, to strengthen our
bodies and to, to be able to root in, in a sense of,
(36:32):
of, of peace and ease will
help any of us not become hard patients, number one. And then if
you are a heart patient, help, help soothe and heal.
And when we relax, when we get that nervous system to relax, that's when our
body repairs itself and our, our body and mind can
connect and rejuvenate. Beautiful.
(36:53):
And how do we find you? How can
listeners find you? Because you help people with this. Yeah. So I
work directly with people on this. You can go directly to my website,
jeremyrothenberg.com I also have a channel on
Insight Timer. I teach meditation, lead meditations. So
I think that's insidetimer.com Jeremy Rothenberg and
(37:16):
we can include, I guess links. I'll have all that in the show notes for
listeners. Great. Yeah. So I offer people free
coaching sessions when they're available and we can have
a 30 minute talk about what's going on for you and give you some free
coaching and see what's available for you.
Wow. Incredible. I hope listeners will take you up on that because
(37:38):
you are just an absolute joy to speak with and, and I
so appreciate your willingness to be vulnerable and
be seen, be heard and share your story because none
of us have to go through this alone. And I know that
your story of hope, inspiration and healing will help many others.
So thank you, Jeremy. Thank you so much. It's great talking to you. I really
(38:00):
enjoyed it and you've heard it here. You will find Jeremy
Rothenberg in the show Notes. Please do consider reaching out
to him. And if you have never used Insight Timer, I
love it. It is such a great tool
and there are so many different like options on there to
listen to Jeremy. They have just like singing bowls
(38:22):
and I don't know, it's like all kinds of bells and whistles that can help
us through kind of the interesting time we find ourselves in here on
planet Earth. So thank you so much for joining. Joining
us today with open heart surgery with boots. Please be sure to come back next
week. I've got another episode queued up for you.
I know you're going to love it. Until then, I love you.
(38:44):
Your heart is your best friend.
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