January 27,2008, Chevy Chase, Md.

When Ken and I married, he had a life expectancy of 42.  When you are 20 years old, 42 seems like a long way away, so I never thought anything about it.  We just lived our life, Ken at medical school and me teaching physical education.  One major differences between the two of us was that Ken paid attention to his body and his health, while I took my body and my health totally for granted.  That attitude and modern medicine has allowed Ken to be 71 years old.

Ken was a sickly child and had many bouts of pneumonia before school.  For a time he lived in Sudbury, before  scrubbers on the smelters, so between the constant infections and  polluted air he developed bad lungs.  This left him with chronic bronchiectesus, [ Ken will not be pleased with the spelling ] which he has  to this day.  He always has  a productive cough, and gets infections frequently, so for the  past 50 years he has been on and off antibiotics.  But he has survived and thrived.

His first serious surgery was in 1963, and had a major impact on our lives.  We moved to Texas for the warm weather.  His fourth year  of medical school, he had a lung abscess, resulting in a collapsed lung .  After the he recovered after the surgery, his Doctor gave him some good advice.  The surgeon told Ken that his lungs were never going to be any good, but Ken would stay healthier if he moved somewhere warm.  We choose Texas for his Residency and Fellowships.  And we loved the warmth.  As an aside,  to help Ken recuperate after the surgery, we took a freighter out of Montreal for a month and travelled up the St. Lawrence River, to Bermuda, and then to 15 islands in the Caribbean.  So something good came out of that difficulty.

The next surgery was a repair to his kidneys. It was an awful mess, trying to repair the congenital defect  in the tube between the kidney and bladder.  After the first operation we elected to do nothing to the other kidney.  This was done in the mid eighties.  It was a bid deal, but not as bad as the lung surgery.

Next comes his farm accident, in truth a life threatening accident.  His leg was repaired and he recovered.  During the accident or surgery, Ken had a heart attract, which left him with a Cardiologist to check out his heart.  He was treated with medicine for two years, but finally the Doctor insisted on the stress test, leading to the angiogram, leading to the five bypass surgery.  In retrospect, Ken was fortunate he had the accident, because he had no symptoms of coronary disease.  He is thin, has normal cardiac output, no pains, lifetime non smoker, drank red wine, got plenty of exercise and has no family history.. But there he is, two days after his surgery and eager to get past the weeks of recovery.  And isn't he lucky.