Andrew Crawshaw of Broken Press have ❤️ surgery

Hi there, I’m Danie, Andrew’s wife and partner, and I’m fundraising on his behalf. (And since he is Andy to me, I’ll probably just default to that, but I think he prefers Andrew. Sorry boo.)

Um, okay. So. I’ve had insomnia since this situation ramped up on Monday so please bear with me as my brain is a bit bonky.

The gist of it—which you may already know as I posted quite candidly about it already—is that Andy (of Broken Press, our screen print studio, and SFI Records, his small press record label), my dear sweet Andy, beloved Andy, Andy of my whole life and whole fucking heart has to have emergency surgery next Wednesday July 26th to replace his aortic-valve. What will be done is something called the Ross procedure, where they slice him open and steal his own pulmonary artery and put that in the aortic position and then replace his then-absent pulmonary artery with tissue from a cadaver. It is maximally invasive surgery that is far riskier than a standard mechanical valve replacement, but his surgeon—Dr. Burke at UW Medical Center—is seriously one of the best in the nation so we are grateful for that.

Anyway, the prospect of open heart surgery is beyond fucking stressful and while we have known about it, have had it looming on our horizon for some time, its immediate necessity snuck up on us after the results of a follow-up echo that came back worse than expected. The test was last Thursday and the news that the surgery was reclassified as an emergency was delivered the day after Andy’s 40th birthday. We had originally scheduled the procedure for September 21 so this is a radical pivot for us. Which is to say, big lessons in powerlessness, in surrender, etc. I’ll say, man is it wild to see how much control we tried to exert over the situation. Tried to fit it in our own timelines, according to our own financial and emotional needs, and uh, as it turns out life has other plans.

We are currently still finishing up jobs but after Monday we will be closed for about three months. Maybe two, but most likely three as Andy will not be able to push/pull/lift/hold/carry anything over 5lbs, and damn if our job isn’t just a bunch of pushing, pulling, lifting, holding, carrying, etc. Since we work for ourselves there is no medical leave, no PTO, none of the usual support systems, which means we are looking at no income until he is healed as Andy is the main man on the press. Another byproduct of being self-employed is that we are heathcare novices. Luckily he bought an insurance plan on the marketplace after the first scary zoomcare appointment but it is apparently not great. So, in addition to the seriousness of the health situation and the upcoming lack of income there will also be an-as-of-yet-unknown amount of medical debt to grapple with as well.

This has been, um, heavy to say the least. Dealing with the entwined existential crises of Andy’s potential death and the terrifying necessity of blowing up our only stream of income in order to save his life has been the vibe of the past 9 months. If that sounds freaky and absurd, absolutely fucking surreal to you, yes. Yes it is. Unfortunately that is reality of the situation though.

To the outward eye it seems like he is normal and that’s great. The human body is miraculous and can adapt itself to all kinds of situations, make almost anything work, but also, at present he is trapped in a vicious loop. He works a lot. Like 12 hours a day, every day, every week. Nights, weekends, holidays, birthdays. Nothing is sacred. And he’s worked this much essentially every year for the past 15. The truth of it is that we kind of have no life, no friends, just each other and our cats and work. Which maybe sounds a little sad when you write it out like that, lol, but I don’t know. It’s just kind of what life is, what’s been necessary to build the business into the steady, reliable thing it is. Also though, both of our tendencies toward people-pleasing and insane-person standards and being control freaks in general (about similar but different things) have meant that often, in so many ways, more work than is physically possible has been loaded on his plate. One tiny error will appear in a job that may not be visible to anyone but us but we’ll be so insistent on maintaining our standards that we will trash the job, start over, cram more work into less time to meet our myriad overlapping deadlines.

You might know or might not but screen-printing is incredibly labor-intensive work. Physically and mentally demanding work, active and exhausting. I have to assume that people don’t always know what all goes into receiving a finished job that looks like their file, but it’s not a computer printer zipping something off. So, while the success we’ve had in this industry is 100% attributable to Andy’s insane work-ethic, the ceaseless pace of work has also undoubtedly contributed to his heart condition. That said, it also appears that his constant activity has kept him alive in some ways too, because apparently the physicality of his everyday life is what has been pumping his blood all this time.

Which, yes, I realize I haven’t even said that he was born with a bicuspid valve and apparently sometime along the way something happened such that now, with every attempted heartbeat, 50% of the blood splashes back and does not make it out of the heart (or maybe now 60% of every heartbeat splashes back as per the new echo). In other words, he runs on half-blood power, half the amount of oxygen needed to keep a person alive, but somehow he’s relatively normal despite this. A miracle man. A freak in the best of ways. I’ll take it, right? Life can be beautiful and mysterious and wow wow wow, thank you for that.

And while I love the miracle that is his apparent symptomlessness, it also might be a plain and practical thing, which is that is that his body has adapted to the circumstances given to it, adapted to his lifestyle. The body knows there’s no rest and works around it. The lungs pump the blood, the diaphragm pumps the blood, the movement of the limbs pump the blood. Being up and at’em and in motion all day has been pumping his blood, and all that has been keeping him alive. But the short term success of keeping him alive has caused his heart to increase in size. While the other systems are helping, the heart still tries, is what I gather. Apparently we are at a tipping point. To compensate for the inefficiencies of each unsuccessful heartbeat it’s grown considerably. Without immediate intervention what comes next is that it will become too weak to pump the blood, which means heart failure. Death. Hence the necessity for surgery now.

This truth has been hard to reconcile because it just didn’t seem real (it still doesn’t) and because it didn’t/doesn’t match our experiential reality, which, like I said, has been of an everyday Andy with the seemingly same vim and vigor as always. Apparently most people whose internal workings are as whack as his find themselves fatigued, prone to fainting, are easily winded, can’t walk upstairs or around the block without running out of breath, etc. He doesn’t have any of those problems, which…has blunted the gravity of the situation somewhat. For better or worse. Yes, we have cried and gnashed our teeth about this—notably right after doctor’s appointments—but then we go right back to work, tears still drying on our cheeks. We have felt sadness and despair and may have inadvertently imbued some of that into the jobs we printed this year because we were scheduled in a way that there was no time to sit with the grief.

But also—and again and again—after the sorrow passed, we would drift into a sort of light-hearted equilibrium. We never forgot what was happening—it has been a weight on our psyches all year—but at times we kind of did. Or we knew but were distant from it, disconnected enough from the raw emotional truth that we joked about it, were really quite glib, blasé in the ways we talked about it, which feels insane as we are now facing it directly and are both scared shitless.

I am writing too much and really need to get to the point here but it is just a lot. I really want to complain about the medical system, about how this was discovered in a routine physical that turned serious really fast, and then how discombobulating it was to receive an urgent referral to see a cardiologist ASAP, see someone within a week because he could drop dead at any moment, and then, you know, try to do that and have it take four months to get an appointment, then several more months to have the necessary tests, etc. There are a lot of et ceteras there, a serious roller coaster of emotions, so much hurrying up to wait. However, despite all of that, I know that these people are going to save Andy’s life. Have saved it already. The people at zoomcare who first caught the distressing symptoms, the cardiologist who expressed a very bleak sense of urgency about the situation (shout out to Dr. Cone), and the surgeons (Dr. Burke and Dr. Aldea) whose expertise will 100% be the reason why he is still in my life for years to come—I have all these people to thank for Andy’s life and I’m beyond grateful for them even if the process these past 9 months has been enough to drive a woman insane.

Anyway. Long story long I guess. I will say, um, I really appreciate the kindness that everyone has shown us or expressed to us since I blurted everything out in the middle of the public square on Monday (on instagram, lol). I am usually a very private person (whether by nature or conditioning) so I don’t know what came over me. I tend to keep my personal cards close to my chest, but it seems that the sudden and acute nature of the news on Monday subverted my normal relational patterns, drove me toward others, prompted me into a bout of otherwise unthinkable honesty and vulnerability. And like, damn if we haven’t been met with more kindness and understanding and support than I ever could have expected, than Andy ever expected. It feels so wild to think about that I’m ugly crying as I type this on the bus. Life is just so terrible and scary but also beautiful and so fucking loving too. If I grew up learning that the world wasn’t a trustworthy place, that you had to shield your true self from others, to obscure what’s really going on from the people around you, I mean fuck man. I’m now learning that the truth of life is the exact opposite of that and I have all of your kindnesses to thank for that lesson.

Whatever happens, as scared as I am, as we are, I feel like it’s going to be okay. And while I would love it if you donated to the cause of keeping Andy alive, even if you don’t that’s alright too. Your collective kindness and understanding has been so touching, it’s put things into perspective and been like, okay, we can make it through this. Even if we get financially fucked we will survive.

That said, your generosity would be appreciated. The way our business works is that our income tracks the touring season, so to be unceremoniously required to shut down—right now—during our busiest time of the year and to be closed right up until the time we generally slow down is a kick in the teeth. Usually we try to take as many jobs as humanly possible during the spring, summer, and autumn months, because come November, December, January, and Feb we are dead and rely on saved summer income to tide us over until touring season begins again. Which is like, yeah. There was a strong current of delusion in us for a while. We thought we could book the surgery in December, work all year to save and have him recoup while we would already be slow. That notion was disabused by his surgeon but the logic behind it is why we had originally scheduled the surgery for September 21. We already had jobs booked through Labor Day and really thought we could do it and that this was the best way to honor commitments to our clients and earn the money we’d need for this situation. But, once again, lol yeah no. Our plans have not worked out. So then it’s like, what? I have no idea but trust that it’s got to be okay. Maybe all of the ways in which Andy has helped other people over the years, printed jobs in a pinch, shared his knowledge, support, kindness, expertise, music, and all of his beautiful fucking work will boomerang back to him and buoy him up now when he needs it most. (Mixed metaphors but you get my drift.)

I know Andy will be antsy to get back to work and that he has promised people that he’ll be back in the saddle at something like two months. If that’s possible, if that happens that will be wonderful. However, I’m hoping to raise enough that if he needs to take three off he will have the financial buffer necessary to do so. I cannot have him pushing himself into an early grave over this. He’s going to need rest and PT and who knows what else in order to heal, and for the love of god, if I have to hold a metaphorical gun at his head to make him rest I will do it. If he overestimates his strength, his physical capacity, and tries to come back too soon he could risk blowing out his sternum, which would require the bone to be rebroken and reset, which would set us back to square one. For obvious reasons I can’t let that happen.

We love him. I love him but I dunno, I think all who know him love him. He is a beautiful tender-hearted man who offers so much to the world and I just can’t bear the thought of life without him, so any support you can offer as he goes through the scariest portal of his life would be appreciated to the fucking moon and back.

So whether you know him from Broken Press, or SFI Records, or one of his many musical projects, or if he designed a poster for your band, or booked a show you played at or went to (hello to any Depths fans!), or you remember the wild art openings our old print shop/work space (112 Printworks), or know us from the old Flatstock days, or know him from Annie’s Art & Frame or Easy Street Records, or just from being a man about town in the music scene for so long—thank you so so so much. Your support and kindness is truly appreciated.

In gratitude,

Danie Skredsvig