Health Adventures

“Do you know you have a heart murmur?” the urgent care doctor asked. Exactly four years ago, on July fourth, 2022, after a ten-mile bicycle ride in San Clemente, California, my body felt different. I couldn’t focus my eyes. My legs were shaking. Odd, I thought. I do this all the time. I sat on the porch steps, head in hand, drinking water, barely able to move. That night, in uncontrollable waves, I went from shivering, to teeth-chattering cold, to sweating. I needed to urin

“Mr. Ron, you’re next,” said Jessica, the manager of Maui Wound Care Clinic, with a smile. The technicians helped me onto the gurney and rolled me into the narrow acrylic tube. For the next two hours, I would breathe one hundred percent oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber pressurized to the equivalent of being thirty-three feet underwater, a desperate attempt to push oxygen into my right foot. The goal was to save what the emergency vascular surgery had put at risk. In early Augus