the geography of survival

Adult Vocabulary Bozeman, Montana 2012

There is a whole body of impressive sounding ten-dollar words and phrases out there that, if you’re lucky, there’s no compelling reason to learn as a kid (or even in middle age). But at some point they are forced into your every day vocabulary. I’m talking about things like aortic stenosis, postprandial angina, echocardiology, angiography, and hemi-sternotomy, all of which I’ve come to learn in the last year. The upshot of all this is that next week Tuesday I’m getting a new aortic heart valve over in Billings, MT. I expect it all to go routinely and should be back home in Bozeman on the weekend. Although I am planning on being back on the computer a day or two after surgery, expect to see some pre-scheduled automatic POTD posts next week while I am in the hospital. But, there may be a missing day or two as I have sometimes botched the POTD scheduling when I’ve done them automatically in the past. The notification emails may or may not get sent out either as they are hard to pre-schedule in Gmail for some reason. I took this photo just last week, as part of a collection of aspen tree bark images I’ve been working on lately. At the time, the relevance of this particular marking escaped me even though I had just been to the cardiologist. It took me working on the collection on the computer for it to dawn on me how apropos it was.]]>