The Deck Where I Fought For My Life

There's a spot on our deck I came to call Mary's Therapy Room.

No therapist ever sat there with me. No couch, no notepad, nothing official about it. Just the deck, the open sky, and however many hours I needed on any given day. It was where I went to ground myself, 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.

I brought all of it to that deck. 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.

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

We've sold that house now. Someone else stands on that deck today, probably with no idea what it held.

They don't need 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.