Retirement, "your aorta's fine," and a new bike

A lot can happen in a day.

First, I retired from Tufts Department of Psychiatry after 5 years there. I had been an administrator, in charge of recruiting and retaining psychiatric staff at Tufts-affiliated hospitals. It was fun, I worked with greate people, but, ultimately, it was time to move on. It was sad having my last two meetings today--even if they were via Zoom. I'm not great at goodbyes. So I emphasize that "I'll still be around", "Our paths will cross", and this is probably true since I'll still be on the academic facutly at Tufts and will supervise residents from time to time.

This is me, trying to look psychiatric in my heyday:

Second, I learned that I am not--I repeat, am not--at death's door.

Long story short: I was born with a congentital mitral valve prolapse, I was asymptomatic until I did a mini-triathlon in 2009 (at age 48), which was so exhausting that I saw my cardiologist afterwards. She looked at the echocardiogram and said I had a severely enlarged heart and a bad leak in my mitral valve--and if I didn't get it fixed right away things could get dire. So in October 2009 I had open heart surgery and Brigham and Women's, and my most vivid memory was waking up from surgery, with a breathing tube in my trachea, holding my wife Tammy's hand, hearing my dad's voice saying "I think he's waking up", and then spending the next hour having a low level panic attack because I couldn't breathe on my own, and the only thing that soothed me was chanting in my head the following words from MC Yogi's song about Ghandi: "Be the change that you want to see in the world...Just like Ghandi".

Fast forward to a week ago, when I got another echocardiogram just to make sure I'm okay doing the 400 mile Bos/treal ride from Boston to Montreal in a month. And my cardiologist said "Your aorta is slightly dilated at the root - we should check this again next year - there is nothing to worry about for now - if the aorta grows very large it is a risk for tear but yours is only slightly enlarged." I liked the part about "nothing to worry about" but I didn't love the part about an aorta tearing. That can't be good.

But today, after my official last meeting at Tufts, the newly retired me chatted with my cardiologist who was very reassuring and pointed out that my aorta has been about the same size for the last 6 years, and that in all likelihood this will never become a problem for me. "Enjoy your bike ride to Montreal," he said.

Third, I bought a new bike!

The process was kind of wierd. It was the first new bike I've bought in 16 years, it was way more expensive than my last bike ($2,500 for this Specialized Diverge vs about $1000 for my 2007 Specialized Roubaix), and the bike comes with nothing, like you have buy the pedals and the water cages etc... separately. It's lighter than my Roubaix (it has a carbon fiber frame, which, while I have no true idea what that means, it does sound quite fibrous). I look forward to riding it for the next Bos/treal training ride tomorrow, a 70 mile tour of the southcoast entitled the Womp Womp Winder. More to come on that.