HeartSnark: A literally light-hearted account of my heart transplant, or Shakespearean strippers, bison meatloaf, and urinal harems!

Terry Kroenung

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The most hilarious heart transplant memoir you'll read this year!

In late March 2019, high school English teacher Terry Kroenung rode a quick 10 miles on his bike. 10 days later he had an emergency heart transplant. Really. Imagine his surprise.

Based on the irreverent Facebook diary he kept during the ordeal, this memoir recounts his experiences with near-fatal pacemaker implantations, defibrillation scorch marks, 7-hour cardiac ablations, surgical staples, and the up-and-down recovery process. Along the way are 6 pregnant nurses, Canadian axe throwers, alien face-huggers, shopping bags full of exorbitantly-priced drugs, and the most horrifying photo of a dead heart that even the doctors had ever seen.

If he hadn’t gone to the Emergency Room purely to avoid a faculty meeting, somebody else would have written this book. There he was told that despite the 100-mile bike rides and 10K races, he had heart failure. Again, imagine his surprise .

What followed was a confusing frenzy of tests: treadmill stress, VO2 stress, enough blood samples to fill a tanker truck, and 3 radiation tests to finally get a reading, which, naturally, turned out to be wrong. But at least after that last one, he didn’t need a nightlight anymore.

To keep himself -- and his shell-shocked wife, family, and friends -- from dwelling on the
life-or-death enormity of it all, he used Facebook to keep a running diary of everything that happened, no matter how trivial or absurd. His snarky, pun-strewn and geeky commentary on events, as well as more dubiously-termed ‘wit’ that he added after the fact , make up the book that you’re somehow still reading about.

A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to benefit Donor Alliance and their life-saving work increasing the supply of transplant organs.