[kx250rider]

OK; here's the rest of the story... The SoCal TV collector about whom the rumor was, is me. I put the post after a friend alerted me that someone had asked him if He knew where all of my TVs were stored.

It's true that I had a heart problem come up suddenly, and God was watching over me as I'm still here writing this. Long story short, I have a birth defect called "bicuspid aortic valve anomaly" It's a malformed valve body, which can only function at 66% of what a normal one does. The result is damage to the aortic valve and aortic root, causing it to blow apart in the worst situation (guaranteed instantly fatal).

About 5 weeks ago, my blood pressure started wavering all over the place, and my pulse at rest went uo to 110+. then it started skipping beats, and started a bad arrhythmia. I was scared sh*tless.

The good news is that after a doctor in the Soviet Republik of Kalifornia told me I "could die suddenly without warning any minute", my father-in-law made a few calls, and I rushed here to Dallas for an all-day appointment at the Cooper Clinic; likely the best heart health hospital in the country. The final diagnosis and prognosis is, I will need a new aortic valve, and the aorta "replanted", which is really scary since they will have to saw me all apart, stop the heart, and restart it after the work is done. The good news is that I likely have at least 10 years before I need to do it, and I hope maybe things will advance by then in new procedures. In the meantime, we hope and think that the blood peerssure and the arrhythmia will be controlled enough with meds.

And the ultimate reward to me, is that both the lawsuit-fearing communist doctor in CA, and the diagnose-on-ethics-and-reality doctor here in Dallas, say that I'd have died by age 30 if I had ever neglected my body, or had not maintained super-low body fat and been athletic the whole time.

It hasn't really sunk in yet for me, and after 30 years in the gym, and passing up the burgers, fries and pies, I feel like I am validated somehow. People have made fun of me in the past for being obsessed with fitness, and I'm glad my Irish head is thick enough to know my goals and meet them.

Charles