At 26, I was newly married, in my second year of law school, and pursuing a master’s in business administration from a university in Silicon Valley. My mother died unexpectedly at age 32 from a heart attack. Little did I know, I had inherited my mother’s bad arteries, and life was about to take an unexpected turn.

At the end of my second year in law school, I suffered my first heart attack, and the next year, at age 27, I followed with two more heart attacks. (The doctors told my wife to say goodbye; they didn’t expect me to survive the night.) I wrote my first book while recovering from a heart attack, as I couldn’t attend class. I wrote California Real Estate Law: Cases and Materials for extra credit instead of attendance that semester. (After 45 years, the book is going strong and now in its tenth edition.)

I did not feel like half a man because I didn’t have the strength or endurance of my peers (although I did for about a year at age 26 with my first heart attack). I found that family and friends are loyal, but don’t know how to react to you. As long as you are comfortable with yourself and put them at ease, they will see you as a person, not your disease. My adjustments and how I accepted life and found great joy in living led me to write two books, Burdens of the Heart and Live, and Don’t Let Cancer Become Your Life.

Sadly, at age 28, I underwent open-heart surgery, which was still very new, as insurance companies had just started covering this operation. It was so new that when I went to another hospital a few months later, all the one hundred nurses came to visit and see an open-heart surgery scar. The operation was successful, but the doctors said, at best, that I had 18 months to live and get my affairs in order. My affairs – all I had were a ton of law books, a car, and a few thousand dollars in the bank. You can adjust to anything. Fortunately, I could accept my illness without a problem.

I took the Dr. Meyer Friedman Course, Type A/Type B Behavior. At the time I started the course, I was working five days a week as an attorney, teaching two nights a week as an adjunct professor at a local university, and considering writing a second book. The course made me realize I was caught up in a work trap, where I was getting my rewards from achievement, not from family or what mattered in life. I changed my law practice to four days a week (and surprisingly, my income didn’t go down. I just rejected the “bad” cases). On my day off, I taught a night class. I spent the rest of my time with my family and made sure I attended all my son’s school games and activities.