I chose life three times….
The Story
For more than two decades, I lived with congestive heart failure. I managed it through diet, discipline, and stubbornness—and for a long time, that was enough. Then it wasn’t.
In the fall of 2024, I arrived at a hospital unable to walk more than ten feet on my own. My ejection fraction was 5%. Death came to my bedside more than once. More than once, I told it no.
On November 9th, 2024, a surgeon removed my heart and replaced it with someone else’s. This is the story of what led to that moment, what happened in the OR, and what life looks like on the other side of it.
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Intimacy and the Transplant Recipient’s Psyche
The central problem after transplant is not dysfunction but silence — two people protecting each other from the same unspoken fears. What lives in that silence, what it costs, and what becomes possible when it ends.
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Testing My Limits
Before my heart failed I regularly worked 110-hour weeks. People told me I was working myself to death. What they didn’t understand is that I loved almost every minute of it—and during those years my ejection fraction actually normalized.
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Weather Check
It is the first of September. It is ninety-five degrees outside and I am on my second full day of a head cold. That combination is not supposed to happen. Colds belong to the other end of the calendar, filed alongside short days and dry air and everybody packed indoors together. Heat belongs to summer,…
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While You Were Sleeping
My number was 58. For twenty-five years, on a bad night, I stopped breathing or nearly did it almost once a minute. Tonight, with the machine running beside the bed the way it has for a quarter century, that number sits between zero and two.
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What Your Ring Actually Knows
Wearables can tell you a remarkable amount about your body. The trick is knowing what they measured, what they inferred, and what they simply guessed. The distance between the sensor and the number on your screen matters more than almost anything else about the device.
About James Nerlinger
I’m a writer, developer, and home cook living in Cincinnati, Ohio. I spent twenty-two years managing congestive heart failure before receiving a donor heart on November 9th, 2024. This blog is the story of that journey — and everything that comes after it.
Choosing life, one beat at a time.
Contact
Thoughts? Comments? Discussion?
JNJ@OneMoreBeat.com
