I’m Still in There

There is a moment, somewhere in the recovery arc, when you realize the person you’ve been looking for has been there all along.

Not rebuilt. Not reconstructed from parts. Just—retrieved. The way you find something you misplaced and recognize it immediately: yes, that’s mine, I know exactly what that is.

For me the retrieval happened in stages. The Impella going in on October 3rd, 2024, and blood reaching my brain in real volume for the first time in longer than I’d known. The transplant itself, six weeks later. The slow months of recovery, the cognitive return that kept exceeding what I’d expected, the gradual recognition that the ceiling I’d been operating under wasn’t who I was—it was what the illness had done to who I was. Somewhere underneath a decade of diminishing function, the original was intact.

I’m still in there.

More than that: I’m back. And in some ways I couldn’t have predicted, I’m better than I’ve been in years.

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Who That Person Was

Let me be honest about what I’m reclaiming, because it matters for understanding what the recovery actually means.

I was a high-octane, high-stress professional who lived for the work. Director-level managed services at enterprise scale—major incident management, global accounts, P&L accountability, teams of fifty-plus people, clients including Disney, MetLife, McGraw-Hill Education, Harrah’s Casinos. Work weeks that ran to 110 hours and beyond. International travel. The kind of pressure that breaks most people…and I genuinely loved every last minute of it.

I wasn’t grinding and it did not wear me down. I was running at capacity, by choice, and finding that capacity deeply satisfying. The high stakes, the complexity, the requirement to think clearly under pressure and make decisions that affected hundreds of people and millions of dollars—that was the work I was built for. I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because I was good at it and it engaged everything I had.

There was always something else running alongside the career. A colleague in my law enforcement years called me a Rogue Scholar—a play on Rhodes Scholar, he said, because I go well beyond traditional modes of study and learn through the most unconventional ways. He wasn’t wrong. The theology, the philosophy, the religious studies—those were never hobbies. They were the other half of the same person who was managing enterprise IT operations by day. The breadth was always the point.

That’s the person I’m describing when I say I’m back. Not a softened version. Not a wiser-but-quieter version. The original.

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The Gap

Congestive heart failure doesn’t arrive as a catastrophe. It arrives as a slow narrowing. The runway shortens. The ceiling lowers. The cognitive function that you rely on—the speed of thought, the capacity to hold complex problems in working memory, the stamina to stay sharp across a sixteen-hour day—begins to erode in ways that are gradual enough that you compensate without fully recognizing what you’re compensating for.

I had been running at what I’d call sluggish for years. Possibly as much as a decade. I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know how wrong until the Impella corrected it, and by then the baseline I’d been calling normal was so far below my true normal that the restoration felt less like recovery and more like becoming a different person. An earlier version, retrieved.

The career wound down during those years—not by choice, but by attrition. The last formal director role ended in 2017. Independent consulting followed, and I kept at it through 2022, as much as I could manage, which was not what I would have hoped. The work I had built my identity around became increasingly difficult to sustain and eventually the body made the decision the mind was still resisting.

What didn’t stop was the scholarship. Through the worst of the CHF years, the study continued. The theological formation deepened. The engagement with Judaism, with Kabbalah, with interfaith and secular philosophy—those weren’t casualties of the illness. They were what the Rogue Scholar does when the formal arena closes: he goes deeper into the thing he was always doing anyway. The library doesn’t require a functioning cardiovascular system at full capacity. The texts are patient.

The gap was real. Eight years between the height of the career and the transplant, and the world didn’t pause while the gap opened. Enterprise IT moved on without me. The tools changed, the methodologies shifted, the certifications lapsed, the network aged. By the time recovery was possible, re-entering the field I’d left wasn’t a question of willingness. It was a question of what the landscape actually offered a 57-year-old post-transplant man competing against people twenty years younger with current skills. There is a further irony in this: the corporate world values presence over velocity. But with AI as a force multiplier, my current output per hour exceeds what I was producing during the 110-hour weeks. The enterprise world is structured to reward the former and remain largely indifferent to the latter.

The honest answer to what the landscape offered was: not much.

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The Build

So I built something instead.

I am on SSDI. I want to be clear about what that means and what it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean I stopped working. It doesn’t mean I lost interest in productive output. It doesn’t mean I’ve accepted a diminished life as the price of surviving a heart transplant. You don’t go from 110-hour work weeks to SSDI because you’re lazy. You go because the body made a decision the mind is still processing.

What SSDI created was the space to build on different terms. And what I built during the recovery period—starting while I was still figuring out how to walk up stairs without assistance—is a body of work I’ll put up against any comparable period in my professional life.

I learned Swift from scratch. Swift is Apple’s primary programming language for iOS and macOS development—modern, demanding, with a syntax and paradigm that takes time to internalize. I did not learn it gently. I went deep, quickly, the way I do everything: fully and fast. Eight applications now live in the App Store under Deep Dark Abyss Productions. A word puzzle game. A Biblical Hebrew learning tool with live calendar integration. A cyberpunk block puzzle. A meditative game built around flow state. An AI-powered email cleanup utility with on-device machine learning. A plain text editor. An SF Symbols reference tool. A developer icon generation utility. Each one a complete software product, built from architecture through submission and iterative post-launch update, independently.

Then there’s the next programming language: Flutter/Dart, the foundations for developing Android applications. Two applications already on the Google Play Store with others in development.

Five web properties designed and maintained from scratch. One More Beat. Many Lamps, One Flame. Deep Dark Abyss. Infobin. Rooted Hearth. Full design, WordPress customization, DNS management, responsive layout, content architecture—all of it.

One More Beat itself: a blog series that has now produced enough content for a book, written while managing a post-transplant medication schedule, clinic visits, and the full weight of everything else recovery entails.

Many Lamps, One Flame: the initial blog series with nearly 100 essays, thematic series, and contemplative work spanning multiple traditions and philosophies already approaching 100,000 words.

A completed theological manuscript of approximately 110 pages—a serious, non-popularized introduction to Kabbalah as a philosophical system, drawing on twelve volumes of the Pritzker Zohar and decades of engagement with primary sources. Acknowledgments that include four teachers of genuine scholarly standing.

A podcast series in production. A novel in concept development. An AI consciousness research project in early stages.

I have done 15-hour coding sessions in recent months—nothing but occasional bathroom breaks, fully in flow, producing at the rate I always produced when the conditions were right. The engine didn’t stop. It was running the wrong fuel for a decade. Put the right fuel in and it runs.

I’ve also learned to work smarter rather than just harder. The AI tools that are reshaping how knowledge work gets done—I was an early adopter and I use them aggressively as force multipliers. The Rogue Scholar adapts.

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The Unresolved Question

There are conversations—abstract, theoretical, none of which I can discuss specifically—about whether some version of formal re-entry might be possible. A high-value short-term engagement. A project with a defined endpoint, a team to hand off to, and an exit. The kind of thing that uses the skills without requiring permanent re-enrollment in someone else’s timeline.

I think about this more than I expected to.

The drive is intact. The appetite for high-stakes work is intact. Part of me—the part that loved every minute of the enterprise years—genuinely misses the game. The complexity, the pressure, the read-the-room intelligence of operating at board level, the accumulated social capital of being physically in the room with the people who make decisions. I loved that. I was built for it. I am, in some fundamental way, still built for it.

But I miss the game without being sure I’m willing to pay the old price of admission. And the price has gone up. What’s more…I’m not sure I could even if I wanted to do so.

The specific arena has new parameters that aren’t about capability. I cannot work in an open office. The immunosuppression reality—recirculated air, people who come to work sick, the crowded elevator, the shared conference room—is documented in detail elsewhere on the One More Beat blog and I won’t re-explain it here. The short version: the environment that enterprise work typically requires is precisely the environment that presents the highest pathogen risk to a post-transplant recipient. That’s not a scheduling inconvenience. That’s a structural incompatibility.

And then there’s the question of presence. Enterprise relationships at executive levels are built on physical currency—the handshake, the working lunch, the read across the table. Zoom carries information. It does not carry the same authority. At some level of seniority, physical presence eventually becomes a requirement. A presentation to the board where I’m wearing a mask sends a signal that undercuts the authority I’m trying to project. A working lunch where I’m asking the server whether anyone in the kitchen has been sick recently is a socially strange moment that most enterprise clients are not equipped to navigate gracefully.

I also don’t know, honestly, where the ceiling is now. I know the engine runs. I’ve proved that. What I don’t know is whether it can sustain the kind of continuous high-performance output that enterprise work at senior levels actually requires over months rather than days. The 15-hour coding sessions are real. Stringing six months of sustained enterprise-level performance together is a different proposition entirely.

And there is the stress question. I loved the stress of the enterprise years. I was made for it. But the stress tolerance I had at 45 is not the same instrument I’m working with at 57, post-transplant, on a permanent medication regimen. I don’t know where the new limit is. I know there’s a wall. I haven’t found it yet.

These are honest questions, not rhetorical ones.

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What the Scholar Actually Wants

Alongside the honest questions about re-entry runs a different question, quieter but more persistent: do I actually want to go back?

The material answer is clear enough. SSDI is not wealth. The things I want—a small house, a Mustang, a German Shepherd, the ordinary infrastructure of a stable independent life—require more than SSDI provides. The mathematics of the situation are not complicated. More money would make more things possible.

But I’ve been thinking about what the enterprise years actually cost, and I’m not sure I’ve finished that accounting. The 110-hour work weeks were exhilarating and they were also relentless. The travel was exciting and it was also a month away from everything else. The high stakes were engaging and they were also, at some level, someone else’s stakes—clients whose priorities I was managing, employers whose P&L I was serving, timelines I didn’t set and couldn’t change.

What I have now—the apps, the writing, the scholarship, the theological work—is mine. Every decision, every priority, every hour spent on what I judge to be worth spending it on. The Rogue Scholar operating without institutional constraint for the first time in thirty years. The work isn’t less demanding. In some ways it’s more demanding, because there’s no team to absorb what I don’t finish and no deadline that someone else enforces. Everything that gets done gets done because I decide to do it.

That turns out to matter more than I expected it to.

The scholarship was always the thing. I studied seriously for decades alongside careers that had nothing to do with it—because that’s what a Rogue Scholar does, study seriously alongside whatever else life requires. Now the scholarship is the main event. The theological manuscript. The interfaith writing. The engagement with Kabbalistic tradition and comparative religion and the questions that serious engagement with primary sources keeps producing. This is not retirement. This is what I was always doing, finally given the space to be the primary thing.

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The Ceiling Nobody Has Found Yet

Eighteen months post-transplant. The cognitive clarity that returned with the transplant has not plateaued. What’s been built on the restored platform has exceeded what I projected, exceeded what the team projected, exceeded what the recovery literature suggested was typical for this timeline.

I don’t know where the ceiling is. I know there’s a wall somewhere—the body is eighteen months out from major surgery, on a permanent immunosuppressive regimen, at 57 years old. These are facts, not complaints. But I haven’t found the wall yet in any of the ways that matter. The output is there. The drive is there. The capacity for sustained deep work is there in a way it simply wasn’t during the CHF years, and that difference is stark enough that I notice it every single day.

What the transplant gave back wasn’t just function. It gave back the person who uses the function. And with that came something the CHF years couldn’t produce: clarity. Not the wisdom-of-age platitude. Actual clarity—about what matters, what doesn’t, what the work is actually for, what I’m actually building and why.

Someone ate your leftovers. You’ll just make more.

The noise that used to fill the available space finds that the available space has been reorganized. What’s left is the actual work. The study. The building. The writing. The questions worth asking and the tools available to ask them with.

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Still In There

I don’t know what the next chapter looks like in its specifics. Whether a high-value engagement finds its way to me and proves workable on terms that make sense. Whether the apps find their audience and the writing finds its readers and the scholarship produces something that matters to people beyond me. Whether the wall I haven’t found yet turns out to be closer than the output suggests, or further.

What I know is this: the person who ran enterprise operations at director level, who studied comparative religion and philosophy alongside a demanding career, who could hold a complex technical problem and a theological question in working memory simultaneously and make progress on both—that person did not leave. He was obscured for a decade by a progressive illness that neither he nor his physicians fully understood until it was corrected. When it was corrected, he came back.

Eighteen months out. Building. Writing. Studying. Shipping software. Asking the questions that have always been worth asking. Running at a level of output that surprises me sometimes when I stop to account for it.

I’m still in there.

Related: Return — on what the transplant restored and what it didn’t, and the difference between recovery and reconstruction.

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