I wasn’t supposed to be here yesterday. It was my birthday, but I wasn’t supposed to be here. Two years ago I was left for dead, written off as a lost cause by medical doctors and everyone with the ability to read an echocardiogram.
I am going to tell you this story, those of you with sufficient interest to read it, because a friend suggested it might be inspirational to someone who has received a dire medical prognosis. I hope it may be inspirational to anyone with a difficult situation in their life. It is a story about nothing more unusual than hope, faith and miracles. It is my story, but maybe you can find something in it for you.
I kicked off a four-day Easter weekend 2008 in a big way with a myocardial infarction. In plain language, I had a heart attack. A bad one. After emergency surgery, placement of seven arterial stents and a three day hospital stay I was sent home to die.
Nobody just came out and said, “Prentice, you’re going home to die.” On the other hand, my doctors offered no encouragement. Not even a little. On my first visit to the cardiologist a few days after my hospital stay, he told me there was a “slight chance” that my heart might improve a little. That meant there was a “large chance” that it would not improve at all, and no chance that I was going to be around long.
It was explained to me that most of my heart muscle was dead, and I understood what that meant. It meant that the rest of me would likely be dead soon as well. My heart, the cardiologist said, was operating at only 10-15% capacity. People don’t live very long with a heart that weak.
When the doctors released me from the hospital during the afternoon on Easter Sunday, Mary Ann drove me home in my old 1978 Ford pickup. Like me, the old truck is long out of warranty, way past its prime and wouldn’t fetch much of a price in the marketplace. Every part on it is old, and a lot of things don’t work so good anymore, but it keeps on going year after year. Mary Ann knows I love that truck.
To the friends and relatives who had come to visit me in the hospital, including our son and his girlfriend who had driven all night from Philadelphia because it was faster than waiting on the next plane, I announced that I wanted to go home with Mary Ann alone. I told them I loved each one of them and appreciated their wanting to be with me, but asked that they allow me to spend my first night home alone with my wife. I wanted a quiet house. I wanted rest in my own bed, and I needed Mary Ann’s head on my shoulder.
We live in an old two story house, and our bedroom is on the upper floor. Mary Ann insisted that she bring down a rollaway bed that we keep stored in a closet upstairs, but I would have none of that. She was scared when I started to climb the stairs toward our bedroom, but I assured her that rumors of my imminent death were greatly exaggerated. The walk up the stairs took a while. It was difficult and tiring, but in a few moments I had undressed and climbed into our bed, and Mary Ann had crawled in beside me. I was home.
Within minutes Mary Ann was asleep. The past three days had been an exhausting ordeal for her, both physically and emotionally. She had not left my bedside at the hospital, sleeping each night slumped uncomfortably in a chair designed to discourage sleeping. She had done what she’s been doing every day for more than forty years. She had stuck with me, no matter what. I was determined to stick with her.
As I lay there in our bed my mind wandered back to the time when our relationship began. It’s hard to know just when that was. I fell in love with her the first time I saw her walking in the hallway at Forest Park High School. It was 1968. It was my seventeenth birthday. It was a magical moment in my life. It was love at first sight.
I’m not sure when she fell in love with me. She isn’t either. It’s a long story. What we’re both sure about is how inconvenient, yet utterly irresistible, our love for one another was and how powerful was the opposition arrayed against us. By all accounts, we never had a chance.
From the beginning we have lived a truly extraordinary love affair, and we learned early on that such love does not come without a price. Mary Ann endured the wrath of a disapproving family, bore the scorn of a condemning church, and together we endured all the indignities that a scandalized community, a town filled with people who would hear no part of the truth, could rain down upon us. Our struggle was long, ugly and even dangerous at times, and the experience left us with more than just a few scars. The outcome, though, was foreknown. There could have been no other result.
We vowed to love one another forever, but I am not at all sure that two people have the power to join themselves together for all time. A thing like that requires a miracle. A thing like that requires the hand of God, and it was God who so entangled our souls as to make them inseparably one. What God joins together men have not the power to overcome. Neither do heart attacks.
Heart attacks cannot kill a man whom God wants to live. In the still and peace of that moment I knew that God, for happy reasons of his own, wanted Mary Ann’s head upon my shoulder, at least for that time. In my heart I knew that God would keep us together. I drifted off to sleep confident that I would wake in the morning with my lovely wife in my arms.
When morning came I got out of bed to begin a new way of life. I knew there were changes to be made. I began my daily walks. On the first day I could walk only to the end of our front porch and back into the house. By the end of the week I could walk from our porch to the street, and within a month I could walk to the end of the block.
Smoking was a thing of the past. I have not smoked a cigarette since the day of my heart attack, and a major overhaul of my diet was immediately implemented. I didn’t play at dieting, I never fudged, not even a little. If I was allowed 200mg of cholesterol per day, I never consumed more than 50mg. If I was allowed 2400mg of sodium, I never consumed more than 1000mg.
After five months my heart function had increased dramatically, and I was up to walking a mile or better per day. My heart wasn’t back to normal, of course, and I had to take everything slow. That’s how things will be for the rest of my life. But death was no longer imminent. Even my doctors agreed that I could live quite a long time. Then came the setback. In September my kidneys failed, and they continue to fail today.
After a hospitalization and weeks of trials with medications and dietary changes my kidney function stabilized at around 30%. Not good, but good enough to get by without dialysis. More draconian dietary changes were necessary. No beans, green vegetables, tomatoes, potatoes, avocados, meat, cheese, whole grains… the list of don’t is depressing. My kidneys will never get better, but I am determined that they not get any worse.
During the hospitalization a laundry list of other conditions—some serious, most not—were discovered. We are dealing with those as well, one by one, each receiving the attention its severity demands.
Now, with all of that in mind, let me remind you that yesterday was my birthday. I have spent more than 700 days laughing and joking and loving Mary Ann, and more than 700 nights with her in my arms, since my doctors sent me home to die.
I have told her I love her several thousand times. Each time she has told me she loves me I have heard it anew. I have heard it with the same joy I felt when she first spoke those words with a wavering voice in a nervous declaration made forty years ago.
We have spent two Thanksgivings and two Christmas days together, and we’ve made over 700 walks hand in hand. I have every expectation that we will make another walk tomorrow.
Last summer we traveled together as two proud parents to be with our son when he received his doctorate degree, and we expect to celebrate with him other milestones in his life as they come along. We have rekindled old friendships and made several new friends during the past two years, and we expect to enjoy those friendships for years to come. Yesterday was my birthday, and I’m still here.
Take from this story what you will. If there is something in it for you, I am glad. Maybe the lesson is different for each of us. Maybe it’s all in the way we look at it. I look at it like this…
God has a purpose and a will for my life. That purpose is not always easily discerned, but his love for me is plain to see. I see his love reflected every time I look at Mary Ann’s pretty face, and I know God because I know her. I don’t know what to expect next in my life, but I know what to expect from God.
Together, Mary Ann and I have been the happy beneficiaries of miracles, not once, but over and over again throughout our lives. Miracles are the very fabric of our world, the very essence of our life together and our communion with God. Miracles are not the exceptions, they combine to make the rule.
As I see the story of my own life unfold, I am not troubled that I cannot read the pages that have not yet turned. Yesterday was my birthday, but I wasn’t supposed to be here. Knowing the future would spoil the surprise.
photo credit: mark groves/flickr.com
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Wonderful story and here’s to a great year for you!
God bless both of you! What a great story.
I know this story is true because I have watched Prentice and Mary Ann on his better health journey. Mary Ann has put in more than a few 24 hours researching nutritional sites and making diet changes. Oh what a heroine she is, not because she has worked so with these life changing challenges, but because I see the love and support she has for Prentice every time I see her eyes meet his. Prentice too is a hero to me! He has earned this title because I see him standing strong as he practices his new healthy life style changes. Even more I see in his eyes too a supreme love for Mary Ann, a love that certainly has been blessed by their God. I’ve already wished Prentice a happy birthday. Now I simply wish them blessings as every day brings new beginnings.
I became reader of this blog after a friend of mine sent me a link. Now I am a fan of the people who write it. I know many people can find hope in this story as I do.
I have the honor of being good friends with the writer’s of this blog. Their story and love for one another never fails to amaze me.
Prentice, you weren’t supposed to be here for another birthday, but you were and because of that, we are infinitely blessed!
Here’s to another year of beating the odds! Ole to you!
Isn’t it wonderful what love can do!
And now it is time for you two to set-up an account with YouTube, turn on your webcam, and BROADCAST your Perkerson-Park Blog. I think a great many of your fans would love to see your faces – and besides you have beautiful broadcasting voices!!! Just promise us that you won’t get so much money from YouTube that you retire from our internet world…..
The love between you and Mary is almost as precious to me as that I shared with Chuck. It does my heart good to hear you shouting it for all the world to hear. I treasure each minute we shared and now that those memories and moments are all that I have left of him, it really makes me feel good to hear that you too needed the time alone with her. Chuck and I had dreams of sharing the typical little house with the picket fence that we all used to envision our parents one day sharing, we weren’t fortunate enough to have that. As much as I love my children and grandchildren, I can’t help wishing we had had a little more time alone together.