Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you!

Yes! AKA hash brown casserole :-)

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.

My valve is not just abnormal but also small. When the biomed valve failed, I’d need open heart surgery. So the question becomes: how strong do I think I am now, how long to expect to live, and which procedure do I want to delay until the replacement valve inevitably fails: open heart or TAVR.

There are minimally invasive valve replacement procedures, that implant a biomedical valve with a lifespan of 7-10 years. That’s fine for the average replacement patient who’s 75… but not for a patient who’s 58.