Open up my heart

Welp, your faithful newspaper publisher is headed to the disabled list. After over a year of walking around clutching my chest — à la L.A. junkman Fred Sanford spouting “this is the big one” — doctors in Billings, Mont., will finally crack my chest open and clean out a valve in my heart making me a member of the “Zipper Club” (that is, someone who has had open heart surgery.)

The technical term for what ails me is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, but I just tell people “my ticker is on the fritz.” For the past 18 or so months — but much worse the past half-dozen or so — if...