I have just gotten home tonight, and it's been a long afternoon/evening, so please forgive me if I am not at my best.

This afternoon Alex and Tom went to play racquetball, and half an hour later Alex called and told me to get over to the gym right away. To make a long story short, Tom got hot/dizzy and next thing Alex knew Tom was on the floor convulsing with his eyes rolled back in his head. Tom stopped breathing and his heart stopped. Luckily there was a surgeon working out at the gym who started CPR but ultimately he had to shock Tom back to life with a defibrillator. By the time I arrived on the scene minutes after Alex's call there were several fire trucks, an ambulance, and at least 8 paramedics working on Tom. He stabilized, and Alex and I actually beat the ambulance to the hospital, where they ran all sorts of tests.

The good news from the angiogram is that his heart muscles seem undamaged. The bad news is that 4 arteries were almost totally (80-90%) blocked. So tomorrow he will have open heart surgery and a quadruple bypass. With all the time Tom spends out in the middle of nowhere (and he had almost been out doing that today!) he was really, really lucky that this happened when/where it did. Alex, of course, was pretty freaked out after watching it all go down.

I have to be at the hospital at 7:00 in the morning to meet with the surgeon, although Tom's surgery is not the first of the day. So the plan is for me to still go and have my chemo at 10:00 (the fun never stops) and then head back over to the hospital and wait for Tom to come out of his surgery.

Tom seems to be doing fine - he's his usual wise-cracking self. But I expect he'll be pretty miserable the next several days. Onward and upward!