Day After Roe Overturned

Today (June 25, 2025) is the day after the third anniversary of the overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. Of course, I posted my celebration announcement yesterday on Facebook, on my personal blog, and on my YouTube channel. However, today, I wanted to post the photo below, which I took of myself on the day after the Supreme Court ruling.

At that time, I was in a physical rehabilitation facility following open-heart surgery in March 2022 and two related chest surgeries in May 2022. I arrived on June 3, 2022.

So, it was June 25, 2022, when I first was offered a newspaper. I am not a fan of The New York Times due to its heavily liberal/politically leftist bias, but that is all she had to offer. Anyway, I accepted the newspaper, mainly because I was and still am extremely happy that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and because I wanted to see the large bold headline printed onto the front page. After all, it really is good news, as well as an important historical event. Unfortunately, someone threw out the paper. I had hoped to save it for posterity.

I had quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery on March 9, 2022, and the two related chest surgeries in May 2022.

I developed severe chest pains, so my wife drove me to the hospital emergency room on May 13, 2022.

For my chest surgery on May 19, 2022, my surgeon removed a metal sternal plate from within my chest due to loose screws and also attended to a staph infection within my chest. The plate was holding my broken breastbone together from my heart surgery. My chest was left open with a wound vacuum attached for about a week.

For my chest surgery on May 25, 2022, my surgeon partially closed my chest by clipping off the tips of my ribs and reattaching my chest muscle flaps to my body, so he told me. He used seven spaced-out sutures to close the eight-inch-long, vertical incision from my lower neck to my upper belly initiated by my open-heart surgery and made worse by my two subsequent chest surgeries, leaving me with eight holes in my chest to heal. The wound vacuum was reattached. My sutures were removed on June 20, 2022. I arrived home on July 21, 2022, one day before my wife's birthday.

Since then I have had two spinal surgeries in 2023: one surgery to clean out an infected disk in September; and one surgery to attach a titanium metal rod to my spine which was collapsing due to a bone infection in October. I would then have surgery on my right ankle in April 2024 for a bone biopsy, a fluid draining, and a deburring due to a bone infection.