Do You Know You Have a Heart Murmur?

“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 urinate every few minutes. Unbeknownst to me, my body was shutting down. Urgent Care fast-tracked me to the Emergency Room. Within a day the diagnosis came back as Endocarditis, or staph infection of the heart. 

Open heart surgery to replace the failed valves was scheduled for the next week, enough time to ensure my body was free of COVID, which was still a factor back then. Something went terribly wrong in the recovery room - the clinical analysis was severe hypoxia - lack of oxygen.

July 2022. Twelve days in an induced coma on life support, then six weeks in the Intensive Care Unit. Photo credit: Murray Chapple

I died twice within thirty minutes. After twelve quiet days in a medically-induced coma, I came off ECMO, the shopping cart-sized life support mechanism that had kept me breathing and my brain from going dark. What I woke to were lifeless legs, destroyed by the perfect trifecta of atrophy, critical nerve injury, and the crushing weight of two massive hematomas.

Statistics gave me an eleven percent chance of survival. I preferred those odds to the alternative. Cognitive therapy started for what seemed like mere amusement until I realized I could no longer tell time. Two strokes had hit my left parietal and right frontal lobes - regions governing math and language. Fortunately, I suck at both, so I would never have known the difference. A phalanx of nurses and therapists taught me how to write my name, tell time, and hold a fork. Healing just to the point of standing with a walker took another five months of intense care. After six months, I still had no muscle from the knees down. I still don’t. I wear braces to keep my feet perpendicular to my legs to facilitate walking. Now I walk with canes. 

December 2022. A few of the many physical therapists who empowered me to go from bedridden to walking with canes. Pictured above left to right, my son Josh, Julia, Lauren, and Ivana.

In November 2023, I was feeling so good about my progress that I tried riding a bicycle again. After all, I had been out kayaking, so how much harder could riding a bike be? Bad idea. After four days, unable to catch my balance, I fell over, my hip requiring emergency replacement surgery. Bicycles and braces do not go together.

November 2023. Learning to ride a bike again. Not my best idea.

Within six months of the hip replacement, using my canes, I was able to walk a mile, with two miles in sight. Then on a Saturday afternoon in August 2025, excruciating pain pulsed through my groin and right leg. My thigh, calf, and foot took on a freakish purple tinge. Rushed to the hospital, I had an ultrasound survey at the Maui ER that revealed a ruptured aneurysm, a side effect of the ECMO from three years earlier, the same ECMO that saved my life. The operating room doctors, in a rush to save my life, had unknowingly punctured the backside of my femoral artery, leaving a slow silent drip of blood that had now coagulated into a peach-sized aneurysm, a side effect for less than two percent of ECMO recipients. I was starting to feel like I should have gone to Vegas instead.

August 2025. Ultrasound revealing a peach sized pseudo-aneurysm on the femoral artery in the groin area of my right leg.

Emergency vascular surgery to repair the artery also released the remainder of the dead stuff into my leg. Over the last eight months, my toes gradually died from the junk that clogged up the capillaries. Necrosis is the fancy word. Since August, a wheelchair has been my transportation to remove any chance of inadvertent damage. In March 2026, the podiatric surgeon amputated four dead toes on my right foot. 

By the end of this summer, Summer 2026, my foot should be completely healed. I can restart the learning-to-walk-with-canes process. I’m ready to top that one mile record, maybe two miles. For that, I’m really excited.

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First, thank you to my family, tireless medical care, patient physical therapists, and whatever divine intervention decided to keep me on this planet for a few more cycles. In talking to many friends and colleagues, I learned that almost everyone is only one degree of separation or has personally experienced a significant health trauma. Many are far worse than mine. I am open to questions. Sharing is good!

UPDATE: Healing of the wounds from my toe amputation are taking longer than expected. I now expect to start walking again by the end of 2026.