The Recovery Chronicles #21 — Five days prior to my second heart surgery, my 65 year old father, Bruce Wayne Stueve, had a stroke. It occurred around 10am. He died at 12:56pm in a hospital bed in Atlantic, IA. He was surrounded by most of his family. I cannot say his death was entirely unexpected…

The Recovery Chronicles #20 — I don’t mean to brag, but I am more aware of my mortality than most men my age. In August 2020, I had open heart surgery for a birth defect called bicuspid aortic valve, a birth defect I didn’t know I had until May 2020 when I experienced a terrible…

The Recovery Chronicles #19 — In the initial stage of recovery from my open heart surgery, when I first came home from the hospital, I had trouble sleeping. Maybe nightmares woke me. Maybe it was the several drugs I had to take at the time. Maybe it was how my body dealt with the trauma…

The Recovery Chronicles #18 — In 1995 my father was diagnosed with Leukemia. After a long stay at Nebraska Medicine in Omaha, NE, he eventually beat it. Fast forward a couple of decades and he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. This time he was taken care of at a hospital in St. Louis, MO. Fast…

The Recovery Chronicles #17 — For those who do not know, a year ago today I underwent the Ross Procedure to fix a congenital heart defect an emergency room doctor discovered in me in May of 2020. This, naturally, was after I had suffered some serious health issues for the first five months of that…

Something for the kids. “The Meditation” is a subgenre of the modern personal essay. It is typically 500–1000 words. Below you will see explanations and examples of three different types. Question & Answer: A question is posed and then answered in the form of an essay. Topics can include but…

The Recovery Chronicles #16 — After you have major surgery in which you are “under the knife” for several hours and attached to a bypass machine, you are left with several side-effects. Many of these side-effects are immediate and obvious. You’re weaker, you have trouble breathing, you’re on a regiment of medicines that each offer…

But it’s necessary. — Over the last few months there has been a series of conservative political pundits and politicians claiming critical race theory is destroying the United States, in much the same way their forebears claimed communism, television, socialism, Eastern religions, rock & roll, video games, comic books, rap music, LGBTQ+, the internet…