I Almost Died in This Backyard. Now We Sold the House.

Mary's Therapy Room wasn't a room at all. It was our backyard.

No therapist ever sat there with me. There was no couch, nothing official about it at all. Just the deck, the open sky, and however many hours I needed on any given day. It was where I went to ground myself in nature the only kind of therapy available to me during the two years I spent in hospice, when my heart was failing and no one had an answer for how to fix it.

I spent countless hours out there. Praying. Bargaining. Making promises I didn't know how to keep! If I was just given more time, the kind of promises you make when you're not entirely sure who's listening, but you make them anyway because the alternative is silence, and silence felt worse.

I wasn't thinking about advocacy back then, or building anything, or the person I might become on the other side of this. I was just trying to get through the day. Then the next one. Then the one after that.

That deck held all of it. The fear I couldn't say out loud to the people I loved, because I didn't want them carrying it too. The anger I didn't know what to do with. The strange, quiet hope that kept showing up uninvited, even on the worst days, even when I tried to talk myself out of it.

I'm still here. The miracle I was bargaining for eventually arrived, in the form of a transcatheter valve and a clinical trial that didn't exist when I first got sick. But before any of that...before HeartBridge Collective, before the trial, before I had a single answer there was just that deck, and me, and whatever it took to make it through one more day.

We've sold the house now. Someone else will stand on that deck soon, probably with no idea what it held.

I don't need them to know. I just needed to say it once, out loud, before I let it go: this deck is where I fought for my life. And I won.

#HospiceSurvivor #MedicalMiracle #PatientVoice #ChronicIllness #InvisibleIllness #TranscatheterVoices #StructuralHeart #HeartValveDisease #ClinicalTrial