My Journey along path of Major Life Event has Begun: Aortic Valve Replacement or AVR Heart Surgery... Dr. Cain Surgeon...

Letter to friends by Peter Menkin

 My major life event has begun: Aortic Valve Replacement or AVR

Read on friend... 

Today is September 23, 2016, Friday

LET US BEGIN TO TALK OF THIS INTRODUCTION TO ANOTHER NEW JOURNEY.
I will be on the Cardio unit at Kaiser Geary San Francisco having been admitted October 17, 2016 for preparation for heart surgery October 20, 2016. My heart valve is failing ongoing,. This is causing me trouble, and that means shortness of breath and chest pains. You may know me as that guy who carries Nitro with him, and uses it nearly daily. You've seen the scene in movies. That is old movies. I'm that handsome older character. How do I look so good and healthy as that actor who is a Star in any of those movies, I don't know. Life is full of mysteries.



 This Youtube is a great one. It is titled,

Cardiovascular Surgeon in Jackson, Miss. Performs Aortic Valve Replacment,

BaptistMedNews 

Uploaded on Apr 27, 2011

Baptist Cardiovascular Surgeon Stewart Horsley, MD in Jackson, Miss., performed a valve replacement procedure at Baptist Medical Center.

Aortic valve replacement is a cardiac surgery procedure in which a patient's failing aortic valve is replaced with an alternate healthy valve. The aortic valve can be affected by a range of diseases; the valve can either become leaky (aortic insufficiency / regurgitation) or partially blocked (aortic stenosis). Aortic valve replacement is open heart surgery.

For more information on valve surgery at Baptist Medical Center in Jackson, Miss., visit
http://www.mbhs.org/med_serv/heart/he... 

Let me share an excerpt of an email-letter I sent to a friend. It contains more than you ever wanted to know. All typo strokes and other errors, including spelling errors, are mine. I probably wrote and sent this as email-letter to other friends at about 3 a.m. in the morning. Here is that excerpt from my copy

sent to Delia Robinson who works at Church of England Newspaper, London. I said she may show others this excerpt, or tell my other friends at the paper of my upcoming surgery. This included the editor of the paper, and its website, Colin Blakely. She has always been kind to me in my relations to her:

Peter Menkin, circa 2015

My reason to write you is to let you know I will undergo what some call Open Heart surgery to replace a valve October 20, 2016. What follows is a quote from an email-letter to another friend. Please share this email-letter to you with my news with others at the paper that I know. Thank you for your prayers.

I need to tell you I go into the hospital at Kaiser Geary San Francisco October 17, 2016 in preparation for Open Heart Surgery at the same San Francisco Hospital October 20, 2016.

A valve needs to be replaced. This is vital to my health. I’ll probably leave the hospital, assuming all goes well in hospital recovery post operation, eight days later. My primary home recovery will be over in about 20 days. My wife, Linda will stay with me during this time, and won’t go to work. They will pay her since she has this benefit to take care of her husband after an

Peter & Linda -- Lovers

operation of this kind. I’ll also have an home health nurse.

By the American Holiday Thanksgiving, I’ll be ready to celebrate with my wife, and probably family. All will be well. I thank God that the Cardiac specialists identified my heart condition, and are acting promptly to resolve this condition, its many problems, just about immediately. I returned just this Sunday past from the Geary San Francisco Hospital where I first met my Cardiac Surgeon Dr. Cain, and where John McNulty, M.D. performed his wizardry to go in through an artery in my right groin to take pictures along the way through arteries to see what might be wrong. No third Stent was needed in Dr. McNulty’s opinion. An ultrasound proved without a doubt with its images, what Dr. John McNulty thought true, as did Dr. Cain, a new valve needed to be provided: It is to be a cow valve.

My surgeon for Aortic Valve Replacement or AVR is Dr. Cain,
 and I will be on the Cardio floor. One gets a room of ones own.

SFO-HOSPITAL

2425 GEARY BLVD

.

SAN FRANCISCO CA 94115-3358

MENKIN,PETER A

Hopeful: I wait for 2nd Stent...

I probably will not come to the phone so easily. You’ll probably reach a nurse on the floor for Cardiac Patients. You can ask after me.

Be sure to pray for me, and pray for the Surgeon and his team…for God to help him in his work, and guide him in the skill of his hands, and that work of his wonderful Nurses and medical people.

Thank God for his Call as a Doctor and Heart Surgeon. We all pray for Dr. Cain, and of course for me, Peter Menkin as patient..

Yours sincerely,

Peter Menkin

Mill Valley, California 94941

THIS IS THE WORK AGAIN.

I will work with this new Journey as a Benedictine, and Brother of the Camaldoli in the world. You know my relationship is in its 18th year with The Hermitage in Big Sur, California. Soon I will sign a contract with Xlibris for a book of 44 pages that will be about 8 1/2 inches square. This oversized paperback will have this normative number of color illustrations. I am choosing photographs as illustrations, as many as 25 of them. They will accompany this text of the poem as it appeared in Church of England Newspaper, London. Here is that poem:

THE JOURNEY AS IT TRANSFORMS US IN OUR LORD THROUGH PRAYER.

Apophatic Prayer: A Transcription (2000)

By CEN on 02/03/2016Comments Off on Apophatic Prayer: A Transcription (2000)

Invited by God into

a wordless kind

of prayer–Cataphatic is opening

Father Michael--Camaldolese Monk

the Bible

and believing

the images of entering

into the wonder of the scene.

The same one invites us

into the apophatic spirituality.

Desert, stripping, pain, addiction.

loneliness. (Aloneness.)

Desert spirituality will be deeper,

and this is one.

Invitation to an all

new spirituality. This is the

monk’s.

Birth at forty.

Forty to eighty.

Eighty to one-hundred twenty.

Moses was offering deliverance.

Settles into what is

the symbolic period

of 40 years~into the future.

After 40 years he was learned to,

as a child,

look at this strange sight,

“Why the bush is not burning.”

Audio Book cover--Bob McCoy reads

Look hard in the desert

at 80 years of age of age.

This is a life as a child.

In the Hebrew: ~ I must go across and look.

This is a leaving of where

he was on a life

with the sheep

and have a look

at something

new.

He must leave this security

of the plain to be

confronted with the mystery.

How far the Lord wanted Abraham

to go as did Peter

in his early morning

as he waited for Christ. As did

Martha when she organized Christ,

or the Spirit.

Martha learns

something when Lazaraz

dies.

God knows when we are

in the desert when he calls

in the desert when he calls,

“Where is Moses.”

It is in the Holy Fire

of God

when we take off our shoes,

as did Moses.

We do it

alone,

in solitude.

The very thing is the presence

of God

waiting for us.

I have heard the suffering

of my people. (Father Michael.)

God liberates Moses,

who in his

brokenness discovers his identity,

and in his~finds his mission.

Contemplation (from male spirituality):trust

in the insecurity of the painful

victory by putting on the

of Christ. “Mercy.”
reads an Oblate, “instead of sacrifice.
“went to the desert.”
Moses meets God
in the inner Desert
and leads those in slavery
outside.

There are two deserts:
The invitation, the inside us
that is the other/Merton calls this
the great self within that is
the God within us. (The ineffable
now of truth.) Entailing
the creator,

we are in failure invited
into another truth,
the abandonment into the word.
For the Oblate (for me),
getting up early,

God very seldom comes as a
gentle invitation.
It comes as an assault on our invitation.

The Gospel only
makes sense
to the poor,
(the weakness of the poverty
of our humanity.)

We are
all struggling with the ideal
of our body, of a woman

and of a man.

The Little Book notates
poverty of spirit– a Little Book:
New look at spirituality,
new look at being human,
new look at who God is.

The Little Book notates entering into
the dying and stripping
–stripped with everything and just being
left with the now.
A cup of wine becomes sacred.
A desert allows us

to find a meaning (a place)
in the sacred.
Cup of wine

a desert allows
burning bush
yes.
This flow is within us
and other people. There
is surrender here.
There is surrender there.

Without doing.
and not going against
the nature of things
we have to go
where we are fed by Christ.
God takes Moses
into the heart of God.

(Words & thoughts by Father Michael, OSB Cam;
poem & transcription by Peter Menkin Obl Cam OSB.)

This version of Apophatic Prayer appeared in Church of England Newspaper, London and was written by Peter Menkin...Colin Blakely, Editor.

THE END OF THIS BLOG IS NEAR.

I am cramming a lot of videos into this posting. At the horrible precipice of creating a visual hodgepodge of stuff, here are two videos that are short and to the point. You, reader, will get the idea right off the bat...as my Mother expressed the matter so simply and well. These two videos comprise the last word of this posting.

I was moved to share this man's journey, if only a small slice of his life's experience with his expression of newness. I pray to do as well as he

 

THIS BLOG ENTRY BY PETER MENKIN IS AT ITS END..
September 23, 2016