[tower]

Dear Taz.

I am so touched by your openness, courage and enduring friendship. You are truly an inspiration. I would love to see you out here in CA. Perhaps you could make the next Moab trip. Let me put your mind at ease re: the EP/ablation therapy. While there are no insignificant cardiac procedures, ablation is one of the safest and most effective. In support of this, I offer the following:

During an EP study the electrophysiologist (a cardiologist with specialized training in the electrical system of the heart) will thread special electrode catheters (long, thin, flexible wires) to the heart, normally through the groin area. Once it is determined which area of the heart is responsible for the arrhythmia, a special wire carrying radiofrequency energy is used to cauterize the site. Catheter ablation is an outpatient procedure that normally takes only a couple of hours to complete and has few complications.


To put this all in a perspective more familiar to you, It is similar to putting the test leads of an ohmmeter into the cardiac muscle to find an aberrant pathway (some wiring of little resistance shorting things out) and then taking a soldering iron to that pathway to destroy its ability to conduct electricity. If you look up WPW (Wolff-Parkinson-White) Syndrome you will find another severely aberrant pathway. A pathology easily treated with ablation to a full recovery.

I am, of course, sad to hear of your difficulties. I try to bear in mind that "God never gives us more than we can handle" (so this proves that you are very, very strong). I once got a quotation from a friend in an e-mail which gave me one of those aha moments. I will share it with you here:

Itzhak Perlman Story

On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an unforgettable sight. He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.
By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready to play. But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap — it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. People who were there that night thought to themselves, "He'll have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage — to either find another violin or else find another string for this one."
But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before. Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.
When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done. He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left." And who knows? Perhaps that is the way of life - not just for artists but for all of us. — Jack Riemer, Houston Chronicle, via the Black Rose Acoustic Society e-mail list



So, my dear friend, Taz, let us (you and I) find out how much music we can still make with what we have left!