 I started to feel pain in my neck, something that I was not used to ever with sports and being an athlete. I also had heart flutters. Something wasn't right. I knew my body. My wife, Denise, let me know to go to the doctor for a physical, which most guys do not do all the time. There they found a heart murmur. Went for further tests. The rest was a leaky aortic valve. At the time, they didn't know that it was caused by me having a faulty valve and born with a faulty valve. So first I met with Dr. Wang. He recommended the surgery, so I'm thankful to him to put me into Dr. Griffith's hands. Matt came to see me because his aortic valve, and that's the main valve that lets blood relieve the heart, but not come back to the heart. That valve was leaking on Matt, and you could hear it with your stethoscope, like a garden of us that was almost pinched in half. And over time, that extra leak back into Matt's heart caused Matt's heart to get a little bit enlarged, and we could begin to see that in some sense, Matt was beginning to suffer a little bit because his heart was getting big, and we know that if we let that go on too long, we can never fix that problem because the heart will be irreversibly injured. Speaking to Dr. Griffith, we're both risk takers, and once he mentioned there was a new valve on the tissue side, I didn't want to go mechanical because I didn't want to have to take blood thinners, I didn't want to have a tick that I could hear, just wasn't something I wanted to be reminded of every minute, so we went with the tissue valve and that was my choice. When I talked to Dr. Griffith, he had mentioned to me, hey, there's a new valve, or a new and improved valve. What do you think? It's a tissue valve, it has, it's called inspirus, it has, you know, special stuff coating on it, it can be replaced easily without going back in, it lasts longer than the eight to ten years of a tissue valve. What do you think? It took me about five seconds to say I'm in. I was excited about being the first one. I told a million people. And that valve became available to us at the University of Maryland Medical Center and just two other centers in the entire country on the day Matt's implant occurred. So we were basically right up there with the front of the team, you know, giving a patient an opportunity for the newest of the new, and the new heart valve is treated differently than the old heart valve tissue, and the tissue treatment is called Resilia. But basically it's a treatment that helps to increase the durability of that leaflet working in Matt. I was up and walking the night of in ICU. Something I was told that nobody's done. I can thank my ICU nurse, Monica. An angel, the greatest person. We walked around ICU. Everybody was watching me and saying, what are you doing? But I wanted to get to the next phase, right, as a plan. I knew what I needed to do to get to that next step and be out of ICU and be able to see my family and friends and come visit me. I would say at three months I felt amazing. I've begun to play softball again. I play with my children all the time in rough house. I have my strength back. I've lost some weight, eating a lot better. And just overall, no pain in my neck. I can do things carefree and freely without having to worry about any pain. It's really just an amazing thing, an amazing thing. I don't even think about what's happening with my heart. I just think about how good I feel and that I can do the things I want to do. The only thing that matters to me is my family. So thinking about my wife and doing things with her and having great times and really those boys are everything. And to be here healthy for them and to have them and playing with me and wrestling with me and have it no other way.