Kyle Rust

Over the last couple of months I have gained the confidence and urge to begin sharing my story. Due to this, people have been asking me more questions about all the facets of my experience. Some of these questions have forced me to really think hard and deep and made me realized I don't even know how to put some of my story into words yet. This is my best try, here we go.

It was late December of 2021 when I walked in to the doctors office for a yearly physical. I have been in the habit of going for a yearly physical ever since I was young due to playing sports. I continued going after I stopped playing sports mainly because it was a habit that I felt was good to continue. My family doctor who I've been seeing for many years walked into the office. We started our normal banter about life that we do every time I see him. He then started the normal examination, checking all bodily functions such as my reflexes, strength, eyes, ears, nose, all the normal checks. He then pulled out the stethoscope, the chill of the hard metal touched my chest. This was when the vibe of the room changed, I noticed a sudden change in his facial expressions. He looked slightly confused and began asking me if he had ever said anything about having a heart murmur. I told him that I didn't think he had which caused him to head straight for the charts on his computer. He noticed that he never put anything in over the many years he had seen me. He asked me if I had been feeling any different than normal which I answered with saying that I had noticed being out of breath during activities that don't normally cause shortness of breath. I also stated that due to the season, I believed it was coming from my allergies, and possibly allergy induced asthma. He wasn't sold on that explanation and still had a very puzzled look to him. He stated that normally the protocol was to monitor the heart murmur for 3-6 months and see him again in 6 months to see if there were any changes. He then stated that with the activity level that I hold myself to with exercise that he would rather go ahead and send me for an echo. An Echocardiogram is a non-invasive ultrasound imaging that provides detailed images of the heart. I know now that this decision to break protocol and precedence was the decision that SAVED MY LIFE.

A month later I finally go in for the heart imaging and in all honesty I walked into that examination room slightly nervous. I didn't know what I was walking into. The only knowledge I had was that I had a heart murmur that caused a certain amount of caution from my doctor to send me for testing. The cold slimy jelly touched my chest and the nurse began the test. I was able to look at the screen that was showing the imaging. I wasn't fully sure about what I was seeing but I had this gut feeling that something just wasn't right. The nurse wrapped up the test and told me that my doctor would be in contact within the next couple of days with the results of the test.

It wasn't more than 24 hours after I was at the gym working out when I received a phone call. The name of my doctor popped up on the screen. I answered the phone and it was my family doctor. He began to tell me that the results of my test came back and they weren't good. He stated that I needed to get in to see a cardiologist immediately and that he had already scheduled me with one for the end of the week. I stood there in slight shock because I had never heard my doctor talk like that before. I had nothing else to say other than that I was going to call my parents and tell them the news. I immediately got a hold of my mom and told her the news. She was also in shock and said that she was going to call to try and get me into a specific cardiologist. I continued to finish my workout and then headed home. Before I got home my mom had somehow miraculously scheduled a visit with one of the top cardiologists in the area for the following Monday. I say this is miraculous because normally it would take months for a new patient to get into see such a prestigious cardiologist.

I spent the next couple of days worried sick about the whole situation. It made my nervousness worse knowing that my doctor was very concerned and urgent about the whole situation because that is not how he normally operates. Monday finally came around and I headed to the cardiologist. I walked into the office and they began taking my vitals. My blood pressure and heart rate was through the roof due to being so nervous. I couldn't sit still while sitting on the table. The cardiologist finally came in and introduced himself and didn't waste any time getting into the situation. He dove into my condition and tried to explain everything in a way that I could understand. He told me that I had significant Mitral Valve Regurgitation and that it was something that was causing my heart to become enlarged. The enlargement began because my heart was working much harder than it should be to push blood out into my body. When the heart contracted to push blood out into my body the mitral valve did not close all the way which allowed blood to be sucked back into my heart. He described my condition as being a severe case where immediate intervention was the best course of action. He made it known that his professional opinion was that I see a cardiac surgeon as soon as possible and go over my options with them. He then stated that there was a cardiac surgeon in the office that day that was set up down the hall. He proceeded to walk down the hall and ask for him to consult, I then see the cardiologist and the cardiac surgeon walk through the door. This is when I knew I was in a serious spot. They didn't waste any time relaying that immediate action was necessary and scheduled me in for a full consultation appointment with the surgeon the following day.

It was time for me now to go see the surgeon. Again I was extremely nervous because not only did my family physician relay the severity of my condition, the actions of the cardiologist and surgeon to get me in so quickly clearly showed how serious things were. I go in to see the surgeon and he takes me into a room with a long table and a large tv — more like a conference room than a doctor's office. He proceeded to greet me with his physician assistant and they began describing the process of my condition. They pulled up diagrams as well as my previous tests on the tv to show me what was going on in my heart and why they are very concerned about the condition of my heart. At this point I was so nervous that I went into a mode where I couldn't really process anything and just started agreeing with everything everyone said. I couldn't process all the information that was being thrown at me due to being in so much shock. I couldn't believe what I was being told. I couldn't believe that at the age of 22 being seemingly healthy, and exercising at the level I do, that I could be in such bad shape.

My mom was with me at all of these appointments and was the person I relied on to make a lot of decisions because I could not process anymore of the information being thrown at me. The surgeon continued to explain the process of the mitral valve repair that he would be performing. He explained that he had helped in the creation of a new form of open heart surgery. This new form was called the minimally invasive open heart surgery that instead of going through the middle of my chest and having to cut through the sternum, he would go through the side of my right pectoral with a much smaller incision. This allowed for a slightly easier recovery process, a smaller scar, and not having to cut through bone to get to my heart. We all decided that the minimally invasive option was the best route. He then stated that he would like to schedule the surgery for as soon as possible due to the severity of my condition. He told me that it was important that I didn't exert myself too much until the surgery due to the fact that he wasn't sure what may cause my heart to finally fail and give out. He basically told me my heart was a ticking time bomb.

I went home after that visit with some peace of mind knowing that the surgery was scheduled and that it was going to be fixed. I also went home scared to death. They basically had told me that my heart was in such bad shape that they weren't even sure how long I had before things went to the worst. They also told me that my heart was to a condition that even with surgery they weren't sure if it would ever recover from the damage that had already been done to the heart muscle. The fact that they didn't have all the answers put an immense fear that touched my core. In the following days, I began planning for the worst. I wrote a will up that stated my wishes if I were to either collapse before surgery or if during surgery something went wrong and I didn't make it. As a 22 year old, that was the last thing I thought I would be doing on a random Saturday. I can say that the following days after scheduling surgery were the longest days of my life — I was sitting around either waiting for my heart to give out or to be saved.

I made it to surgery day. One of the most nerve racking and anticipated days of my life. I woke up on that Tuesday morning bright and early. There was a tenseness stirring through the house that morning that I had never felt before. I was nervous, my parents were probably just as nervous and scared as I was, just in a different way. I couldn't speak any words to anyone because I just had nothing to say. We got everything ready and headed to the hospital. We got to the hospital and made the walk from the parking lot to the front doors. She asked for my name and all the things needed to get me checked in. I told her I was there to have heart surgery and that the two people with me were my parents, giving consent that anything that happened they were the ones to be notified. That is when she told me that due to still being in covid rules, I was only allowed to have 1 person go up with me. My heart sunk. I had to choose between the 2 people in this world that I trusted the most and needed by my side in that moment. I looked back at my parents and my dad said that he would go out and wait in the car and that my mom should go with me.

We finish getting checked in and head up to the floor the surgery was on. I go in to the pre-op room. This is where I sat for the next hour or two getting prepped for surgery. They came in and got my vitals. Hooked up IVs. Shaved my entire body. I met the team of doctors and nurses that would be in the operating room. This lasted for some time and then I had just a little bit of time where it was just my mom and I. I tried to keep positive thoughts and positive vibes but it was tough. I was fearing for my life and my future and my mom was fearing for the life and future of her child. They finally came and said it was time for surgery. They started pushing different things in my IV to relax me and then began to roll me out of my room. As I was leaving the room I looked at my mom and told her that I loved her and that I would see her soon. They rolled me down the cold blank hallways until we got to the operating room. The operating room was massive, there were huge pieces of equipment, and there were a lot of nurses and staff walking around the room. They wheeled me right up to the operating table and transferred me onto the cold metal operating table. It sent chills through my spine. Finally the surgeon entered the room, greeted me, went over the surgery one last time, and said that it was time to put me under. He put the mask over my face and I began to count down from 100. I think I made it to about 90 and things started to fade. The room started to spin and then everything went black.

This is when things get interesting. As the lights went out on me as they put me to sleep on the operating table I saw the blackness coming. For a good amount of time everything was black — no dreams, nothing. Then the craziest thing happened. All of a sudden I was in the living room of my grandparents' old house with my two grandparents sitting there with me. Now you may ask why this may be crazy or out of the ordinary. My two grandparents who were sitting there with me had passed away years prior to this surgery. The house we were sitting in, we had sold many years prior. This was an outer worldly experience for me because the two people who I wanted to talk to the most when I found all this out were my grandparents, and there they were right there in the thick of it with me. This is what is called a Near Death Experience. It was fully diagnosed as a NDE and I can say first hand it was not a dream. This vision was more real than real. If you think about the best picture you've ever seen on a television or camera, this trumps it. It was like everything was in extreme high definition. I could see every stitch in the carpet, every grain in the wood paneling on the walls, every minuscule detail was there, just perfect. The light that was shimmering through the windows had this jaw dropping power and love to it. There are zero worldly comparisons to what I saw in this vision. My two grandparents were sitting in the chairs they sat in all the time and they were just there with me — no words were said, no whispers muttered. They were just there with me and that was all I needed. I had the weight of the world lifted off of my shoulders. I could just sit back and relax, and the relaxation I felt in this place was like no other.

I was then pulled into another vision — one that was not as inviting and left me with many more questions than answers. I was standing on a mountain with a godly figure looking out over a desert. There was a group of people walking in a strategic 2x2 line down the desert, all wearing what looked like jumpsuits, walking aimlessly yet formally. I still to this day don't understand why I saw this and what the meaning of it was but I do know it wasn't a dream. It again was more real than real — every grain of sand was perfect, the shimmer of the light felt more powerful than anything in this world. This vision left me with a lot of questions which led to a lot of pain and agony over what I saw and why I saw it.

Then I woke up to the sight of my parents' faces looking down at me. They were right there with me, both of them. I began telling them the things that I had seen and that I got to spend time with grandma and grandpa. I then immediately began to feel the pain of surgery. It was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. I remember it like it was yesterday and still can't get that agonizing pain out of my head. I looked back up at my parents, they were holding it together the best they could even though I did see a tear or two rolling down their faces.

It was a stressful yet gratifying experience that has created the man I am today. I wouldn't be where I am at today getting to share my story without any of this. I have been through the ups and downs of this entire experience and it has shaped and formed me into a better man than I was before surgery. Even though I would not wish this experience on anyone, I can say I am thankful for what I have been through and know that God has his plans for me, and his plans have placed me here today writing about my story to share with the world.

On the outside, life looked like a comeback story.

I had survived open heart surgery. I had moved into my own place, a multifamily property I bought during my recovery, renovated with my own hands, and moved into while renting out the other units. I had a dog. I had a job. I was lifting weights, running miles, taking care of my building. I ran a half marathon in March 2023, the Heart Mini Marathon, put on by the American Heart Association, a race that felt like a statement. Look what this heart can do now. I crossed that finish line and felt something I couldn't quite name. Pride, maybe. Proof.

Then May 3rd, 2023. The Flying Pig Marathon. A full 26.2 miles through the streets of Cincinnati, a promise kept to a nurse who had known my grandparents, a goal I had set from a cardiac rehab chair when I could barely walk across the room. Moose had run every single training mile beside me. Every early morning, every long Saturday run, every mile I talked myself into when I didn't want to do it, he was there. He wasn't there on race day itself, but he had already done his part. He had gotten me to the start line.

My parents were at the finish line waiting for me. Less than fourteen months before that finish line, a surgeon had stopped my heart. And now I was finishing a marathon. The moment I crossed that line and found my parents in the crowd, I buried my head in my mom's shoulder and lost it completely. That race showed me I was back. That I was healthy. That I was capable of anything I set my mind to.

But here is the truth I have to tell, because this is not a highlight reel.

I did not stop drinking to train for that marathon. Not once. I ran long training runs on Saturday mornings hungover from Friday nights. I stopped drinking for two weeks before race day because I knew I had to, and in those two weeks all I could think about was how badly I wanted to get back to it.

That was the part I didn't tell anyone. That was the part nobody saw in the finish line photos.

People would come up to me and say it directly, Wow Kyle, you've handled this so well, I don't know if I could do what you've done. And I would smile and thank them and feel like a complete fraud. Because I had nothing together. I was a basket case of raw emotions I didn't understand, walking around in a body I didn't fully recognize, with a version of myself on display for the world that had almost nothing to do with what was actually happening on the inside.

The races gave me something to aim at. As long as I had a goal in front of me, a physical, measurable, undeniable goal, I could keep the other stuff at bay. I could point to the miles and the finish lines as evidence that I had it together. And on the surface, nobody had reason to argue with me.

But the nights told a different story.

The months immediately after surgery were consumed by recovery, physical therapy, medications, appointments. My entire focus was on healing the body that had just been cracked open and repaired. There wasn't room for anything else.

I thought I was okay.

Then about six months later, everything I had been pushing down came flooding back all at once. The near death experience. The visions. All of it hit me like a wave I never saw coming.

Because it wasn't just my grandparents I saw on the other side. There were two visions. The first was standing in their living room, familiar, warm, peaceful. Home in a way no place on earth has ever felt like home.

The second one left me with more questions than I will probably ever have answers to. I was standing on top of a mountain in the desert, next to a godly figure. Below us stretched an endless desert landscape, and moving through it was a group of people walking in a two-by-two line, all wearing the same outfit, all moving in the same direction. No one breaking from the line. No one questioning the path. Just following, because everyone else was following. Every detail was perfect, every grain of sand visible, the sun beating down but not burning, like warmth made of something closer to love than heat. No words were spoken. Just the vision. And then I woke up looking at my parents.

That second vision has never left me. Why did I see what I saw? What was I being shown? Who were those people? I still don't have the answers. What I have instead is a sense of purpose that quietly confirms itself every time I do something aligned with the path I believe I've been put on, when I cross a finish line, when I fund a screening, when someone tells me my story changed something for them. In those moments the questions get a little quieter and the purpose gets a little louder.

But in those first months after surgery, I was scared to share any of it. I didn't have that clarity yet. I just had the questions, with nowhere to put them.

I went down every rabbit hole I could find, read everything, watched everything, searched for anyone who had been through what I had been through. The problem is those answers don't exist here on earth. You cannot find proof of heaven in a Google search. And the harder I chased, the more lost I became.

And underneath all the questions lived something darker, something I was ashamed of even thinking. I had felt something in those visions, a peace I hadn't felt a single day since waking up in that hospital bed. And sometimes, at 2 in the morning, I would catch myself grieving the fact that I came back.

That thought terrified me. Wanting to stay would have meant leaving my family, my mom, my dad, my sister, everyone who stood in that waiting room while a surgeon held my life in his hands. How could I feel that? I had no framework for it, no language for it, nobody I trusted enough to say it out loud to. So I didn't. I built walls instead. High ones. The kind that look from the outside like confidence and independence.

The hardest part of those months wasn't the physical recovery or even the unanswerable questions. The hardest part was looking in the mirror and not knowing the person looking back.

I know now, I didn't then, that I was grieving. Not grieving someone else. Grieving myself. Grieving the man I was before I went into that operating room, because that man didn't come back out. The person who came out was different. New feelings I had never felt before. New values that hadn't existed in me before. I wasn't broken. I was someone completely new, trying to figure out who he was in real time, through every conversation, every hard moment.

My therapist eventually helped me understand that what I was going through had a name, that the confusion and the emptiness wasn't weakness or damage. It was grief. The most disorienting kind: mourning a version of yourself that no longer exists. Once I understood that, I could start learning who this new person actually was. Day by day. It was slow, and it was hard, and some days it still is.

But that understanding came later. In the moment, all I had was the performance. I curated a version of myself that functioned perfectly in public, went to work, hit the gym, ran my miles, showed up to the bars on Friday night with a smile that cost me more than anyone knew. I was living alone by then, Moose and I in our unit, nobody to answer to, nobody to notice what happened after the runs and the long days were done. I would come home, sit down on the couch, turn something on to fill the silence, and then a scene would hit, a moment of loss or love or someone saying goodbye, and something in me would give way. I would sit there in the dark with Moose pressed against me and fall apart in a way I never let anyone else see.

Alcohol gave me a break from my own mind. That's the most honest way I can say it.

When everything inside my head felt impossible to carry, drinking quieted it. I wasn't the guy with the unanswerable questions, the guilt, the grief, the visions he couldn't explain. I was just a 22, 23-year-old out with his friends on a Friday night. Normal. Unbothered. Fine. I told myself that's all it was, this is just what people my age do. My friends were doing it. Nobody was raising a hand and saying this is a problem, because I had surrounded myself with people whose version of a good time looked exactly like mine.

But I knew. Somewhere underneath the noise, I knew. Two weeks without a drink before the Flying Pig and all I could think about was getting back to it. That is not someone who just likes to have a good time on the weekends. That is someone who has already let something take root deep enough that the absence of it feels like loss.

I lived this way for about a year. Work, gym, Moose, run, manage the building, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, start again. It was a loop I could control. As long as I stayed inside it, nothing could reach me. Family members made comments. Friends made comments. People who loved me saw something I refused to see. I heard every one of them and dismissed every one of them without a second thought.

I'm embarrassed by this time in my life. I still am, even now, embarrassed that I let myself fall into that cycle, that I let it go on as long as I did, that I made excuses and refused to call it what it was. The hardest part of this whole journey, harder than surgery, harder than recovery, harder than the questions I'll never fully answer, has been forgiving the person I was during those years. That forgiveness is still a daily practice. Some days it comes easier than others.

You can't outdrink your trauma. It waits for you. Mine waited patiently until I had no choice but to face it.

God, apparently, had other plans.

August 5th, 2023. The assault. The brain injury. The hospital bed. The silence.

I'm not going to lay out the details here, that's not what this page is for. What matters for this story is what it did and what it forced. Weeks off work. A brain that still carries the weight of that night. And, finally, a decision I had been avoiding for over a year.

After the assault, I finally made the decision to see a psychiatric therapist.

It was the best decision I have ever made in my life.

Here's what therapy didn't do, it didn't hand me running. I was already running before I ever walked into that office. My body had already found its way to the road before my mind caught up with why.

What therapy did was help me understand what running was actually doing for me. My therapist helped me see that running was giving me something I couldn't find anywhere else, a space to be completely alone with my own thoughts. No distractions. No numbing. No escape hatch. On a 20-mile run there is nowhere to hide. Whatever you've been avoiding all week is going to find you somewhere around mile 14, and you're going to have to sit with it until you get home. That's not a punishment. That turned out to be the medicine.

Therapy gave me the understanding. Running gave me the practice. Together they gave me my life back.

But I need to be honest about the timeline here too, because I don't want to make this cleaner than it was. Starting therapy did not mean I stopped drinking. Not even close. I was still walls up. Still deflecting. Still hiding behind the assault story so I didn't have to talk about anything underneath it. I set myself a rule, no drinking during the week, only on weekends, which sounded like discipline but was really just a managed version of the same problem. Survive until Friday. Drown it all. Spend Sunday on the couch in a fog of regret and self-pity. Wake up Monday and do it again.

That was where I was, walls still up, four months into therapy, still drowning every weekend, when Maverick came home.

I had known Maverick was coming for almost a year before that dark stretch even started, a deposit on a litter, a secret I hadn't told anyone, something to look forward to when I had almost nothing else to look forward to. He came home December 6th, 2023, in the middle of the worst year of my life, and I didn't fully understand yet what he was about to do to me.

That first night, watching an eight-week-old puppy tear around the apartment with Moose, I felt something I hadn't felt in months. Joy. Not the manufactured kind I chased on Friday nights, real joy, the kind that fills your chest and makes everything else go quiet for a while.

The weekend after he came home, my phone started filling up with the usual messages. What's the plan? Where are we going? I didn't respond. I sat there with an eight-week-old puppy across my lap and Moose beside me, and I asked myself a question I hadn't asked in a long time: what do I actually want my life to look like?

I knew I couldn't leave that puppy alone for hours to go out and drink. I knew it in my body before my brain caught up. And underneath that came a quieter, heavier thought, I had been doing exactly that to Moose for over a year. Leaving him. Coming home in states that weren't fair to him. Maverick's arrival put that guilt in a frame I couldn't look away from anymore.

I want to be clear, because the timeline matters: getting Maverick was not the moment I got sober. My last drink was still about nine months away. There were still nights out after he came home. But every single time I went out after Maverick came home, I hated it more. The gap between who I was becoming and who I was still pretending to be had gotten too wide to stand in comfortably.

That growing, undeniable disgust with the version of me that still showed up to the bar is what finally brought me to Labor Day 2024. Not Maverick alone. Not therapy alone. The accumulation of all of it, the puppy on my lap, the questions I was finally asking out loud, the image of Moose waiting at home, and the feeling every Sunday morning that I was wasting something that had been given back to me at a price most people never have to pay.

Maverick didn't save me from drinking. But he started the chain reaction that made saving myself possible.

I am sober since Labor Day 2024. I am running 2,000 miles in 2026, one mile for every young life lost to sudden cardiac arrest this year. I walk a road most people don't choose. That road has given me everything.

Miles gave me something the questions never could, a place to put all of it. Every hard mile is a conversation with myself. Every long run is an hour of processing what I've been through, where I'm going, and what I'm building. Moose and Maverick run every step with me. They don't ask questions. They don't need explanations. They just show up every single day, no matter what, and somewhere in that consistency I found my own.

I won't pretend the weight goes away. I still feel all of it, every year, every hard mile. The gratitude and the grief arrive together now, and I've stopped trying to separate them. They're both part of the same story.

What's changed is that I know now why I came back. Not because I ever got the answers about the mountain, or the desert, or the people in the line. But because there was something left here worth coming back for. A mission. A community. Two dogs who needed me as much as I needed them. And maybe somewhere out there, a parent who reads this and gets their kid screened, and that kid lives, because I came back and decided to do something with it.