Five years ago today I posted the following.  I was 5 days post surgery to replace 6 inches of my aorta. I came within a few hours of dying and the surgery was something of an improvisation by a gobsmacking team of world-beating surgeons at UT Southwestern. At the time of this post, I was still in intensive care.

My current daily routine:

It's 4 am and I am descended upon by a horde of young women in nursing uniforms. They jar me from my sleep without warning and demand that I answer shockingly personal questions about my bathroom habits. After answering their questions, they seize upon my body with sharp needles, siphoning off my blood and injecting me with some kind of marinade.Then they demand I sit up in a chair, whereupon they shove a big gulp sized glass full of pills in front of me and demand that I swallow them. (One of the pills is the nefarious "potassium" pill. It is made with microscopic tongue grippers to make it completely unswallowable. It is the bane of the pill swallowing community.)

I am allowed a communion cup of water to accomplish this task.

These women, as weird as it may seem, are the pointy end of the spear in driving back the forces of darkness. I'm not kidding.