Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you!
Tomorrow I have open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve. I have severe aortic stenosis, due to having two separate rounds of radiation: head and neck cancer in 2012 then lung cancer in 2015. I feel like adding open heart surgery to my health journey is where it officially jumps the shark.
Yes! AKA hash brown casserole :-)
There is no better pick me up for a dev than watching a video of their game, from a few months ago. It’s very easy to forget how utterly shitty your last build looked, but I promise,it looked terrible. It played even worse.
My current game project actually harkens back to my GDC talk You’re Not Broken. Looking ahead at and then recovering from open-heart surgery is a great way to test out my game design theories and let my physical and mental experience inform my work. m.youtube.com/watch?v=eTWc...
Then I got lucky in a clinical trial and… here I am, still alive and cancer-free 🤞seven years later. I never imagined I’d be placing my bets on living to 75 or older. That’s still really hard to process—even harder than open-heart surgery!
I know how risky chest surgery is after the huge amount of cancer radiation treatment I’ve had. So yes, there’s some anxiety. But there’s also joy and gratitude. For about 4 months in 2016, I had terminal metastatic lung cancer. I’d be lucky if I lived two more years.
Then the choice becomes more clear: delay the safer, easier TAVR and do the harder thing now, while I’m younger. If I have open heart surgery now, the mechanical valve will also eventually fail but at that time, I can still have TAVR. So I’ll be having open heart surgery sometime in the next month.