Sure, the happiest couples find things to do together.
But Tina White and Brady Drury turned the whole “shared experience” concept on its ear in late July, when Tina was rolled into the operating room to replace an artificial heart valve in a Kansas City hospital.
About a mile away, Brady — her beau of more than 13 years — was undergoing an emergency surgery of his own, a quadruple bypass.
Both procedures were successful. Tina and Brady were both home within a matter of days, and are well on their way to a full recovery.
Brady, 52, is back at work in the maintenance department at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center, where he returned Sept. 14.
Meanwhile, Tina, 62, remains at home, still marveling at the twists of fate that tell their story.
“You know, God has really been with us through all of this,” Tina said. “As long as he keeps letting us keep on going, I’m gonna enjoy this.”
“I just keep on trying to be better than I was the day before,” Brady said.
TINA knew all summer that she was eventually going to go under the knife, to replace the heart valve installed in 2003.
“I’ve got a lot of health issues,” she explained, many of which stemmed from extreme obesity in her younger years.
At her peak, Tina weighed 645 pounds, before undergoing gastric bypass surgery in 2003.
The extreme weight was beginning to take its toll on her back.
And while Tina avoided such maladies as high blood pressure and diabetes, the weight also started affecting her heart.
The gastric bypass was successful, and she began shedding the weight instantly, to the point additional procedures were necessary to cut away loose flaps of skin.
She weighs in now at a svelte 148 pounds.
As she lost the weight, doctors soon realized her weakened heart wasn’t improving. She underwent a procedure later that year, in which an artificial valve was inserted, with the expectations that it would need to be replaced in 20 years or so.
