Dean Kuni
October 18th, 2007
April 4, 2005, is a day I will never forget. This was the day I thought life was over. This was the day I thought would be the last for me to kiss my wife and hug my two wonderful children. This was the day I learned I had a Type III dissecting aortic aneurysm and was told that although I didn’t die at that very moment, 50 percent of people having this kind of an aneurysm die within 48 hours. This I thought was my death sentence. After all, comedian and actor John Ritter had died nearly two years earlier of the same thing. However, because of miracles in healthcare, my doctors were able to stabilize my condition with medicines and other treatments. These blessings offered me a second chance to continue to live my life, and because of this amazing miracle, my priorities in life have really changed. When you live your entire life as an active and healthy person, as I was, you are easily led to believe you are invincible. You feel like you will be around forever and end up taking certain things in life for granted.When my aneurysm was discovered, which was a completely unexpected medical emergency, everything came to a halt. As my wife Cathy can tell you, no one knew if I was going to live another day. Any surgery I had was going to be life threatening. Just staying alive, much less gaining the strength I needed to really live again, was our top priority. My family encouraged me every day with remarkable hope and love.
I slowly began to gain the strength to walk again, to talk again. And with these new steps towards recovery, I realized that my priorities had changed. Nothing was more important than spending as much time as possible with my family.There was a good chance that I could have lost everything that day when I had my aneurysm. But the odds were in my favor thanks to medicines that saved my life. Without my medicines and my family, my recovery would have been unimaginable.
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