Open up my heart

Welp, your faithful newspaper publisher is headed to the disabled list. After over a year of walking around clutching my chest — à la L.A. junkman Fred Sanford spouting “this is the big one” — doctors in Billings, Mont., will finally crack my chest open and clean out a valve in my heart making me a member of the “Zipper Club” (that is, someone who has had open heart surgery.)

The technical term for what ails me is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, but I just tell people “my ticker is on the fritz.” For the past 18 or so months — but much worse the past half-dozen or so — if I am not sitting down, I am in constant pain, gasping for air and my chest feels like it is being squeezed by a boa constrictor. As I said, for a spell the pain was occasional and not too intense. It was somewhere around the time I stopped smoking cigarettes seven months ago that the problem became worse I asked everyone at the Phillips County Hospital and Family Clinic if I should start smoking again to cure my problem, but they all said “no.” I sought a second opinion in Billings, but the people down there assured me that my idea was a bad one and I remain smoke free today.

My surgery is scheduled for this Friday, which is on the 13th. Because I am so not superstitious, I have asked the medical staff in Billings to wheel me beneath all ladders in the vicinity on the way to the operating room while I open and close an umbrella, smash mirrors along the route with an upside-down horseshoe while I disregard a lap-full of chain letters sent to me by a black cat. I am, of course, just kidding and wrote this entire paragraph with my fingers crossed. Since my surgery is on the infamous Friday the 13th, I have asked the doctor to wear a hockey mask and make his initial incision with a machete. He and I have agreed that this joke has run its course so I now digress.

The reason I write of my impending weeks away from the newspaper is not for pity or well-wishers (though I will accept both) but rather to ask for your patience over the next month or so. We at the PCN will not be able to make it to as many events each week as usual and we won’t be able to write as many stories. One person of the PCN’s editorial staff being away means the the editorial staff is cut in half. PCN Sports Editor Pierre Bibbs will be a one-man band covering both sports and news for the next handful of weeks and the Glasgow Courier’s Publisher, James Walling, will also be spending a few days each week in Phillips County helping our staff out. As always, readers of the community newspaper are encouraged to continue to send in news, pictures and announcements and I thank you all for that in advance. I also thank you in advance for your understanding and am writing this to assure the paper’s readership that if we miss your reporting on your event, it doesn’t mean we don’t care. You can either submit information to us for inclusion in the pages of the PCN or we can catch up when we are back to a fully functional newspaper staff.

Aloha,

Mark