For the past year we have been living with the results of diagnostic tests interpreted by the Blood Pressure Clinic and the Heart Institute at the Ottawa Hospital as unmistakable indications that my husband's heart was not operating as it should. Despite which he never at any time manifested signs that this was the case.

He has always been a man of high energy and resolute activity. From the time he was a teen to the present, several months from his eightieth birthday, he has never lacked for inspiration to build or create ambitious things always carried through to fruition, and to lead a vibrantly active lifestyle. Not for him a surrender to age limitations; he recognized none.

But at some unknown time in what we surmise must have been the recent past he had suffered a heart attack whose occurrence we obviously knew nothing about.

How that is possible is beyond our understanding, but this is the diagnosis and conclusion we were given by the diagnostic team of specialists at one of Canada's premiere heart institutions. That event had led to his mitral valve becoming corrupted, so it no longer was capable of performing its primary functions to the heart. For one thing, there wasn't enough oxygen making its way to his heart.

For another two of his main arteries were almost completely blocked due to atherosclerosis. A tertiary, minor artery had taken over some of the work normally performed by the major ones, while still another, perhaps the third of those required to perform the task of moving blood to and away from the heart was only partially blocked.

So a double-heart-bypass was needed, along with mitral valve replacement. Because my husband is in such otherwise excellent shape for a man his age, the cardiologists who examined him felt his age to be no obstacle to his undergoing open heart surgery and anticipating a full recovery. But because he was symptom-free of pain or stress or lack of energy, and we were able to go along with our normal lifestyle, remaining active, this was not seen as an emergency.

So we waited month after month for an assigned date for the surgery to occur. First we were told, back in March it would be July, then it shifted to September. We were finally given the date of 22 September for the surgery, and the name of the surgeon who would be providing his expertise to repairing my husband's full heart function.

Then came an intensification of the dread that overtook us at the imminent prospect of that dauntingly frightening surgery. Now, just over a month later we can look back at the difficulties the first weeks post-surgery presented, the feeling of hopelessness that recovery would ever begin to kick in, to the present time where we are marvelling at the swift progress in recovery that has suddenly taken hold over the past week.

And we feel fortunate, grateful, overjoyed.