At its zenith, the B'nai Zion Temple in downtown Shreveport served as a herald for the city's thriving Jewish community, complete with majestic Corinthian columns and detailed stonework on the facade.

Let me explain. This was no ordinary English test or algebra quiz, where it took a 93 percent or better to make me happy back in high school. This was an echocardiogram. A normal result is anywhere from 50 percent to 70 percent, according to Dr. Google..

“Mainly, it’s water in the bathrooms,” he said. “None of the male urinals work. The commodes work intermittently. They shut the men’s bathroom in the patrol division down because it flooded with contaminated water. The renovated gym was done around 2001 or 2002.

I have passed so many visible benchmarks along the way. I can see the number on the scale. I can count the notches on my belt. I know how baggy my jeans have become. All of those things pointed toward a positive test result. That wasn’t good enough, though.

The Choice Neighborhoods program is a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development initiative. According to HUD’s website, the program “leverages significant public and private dollars to support locally driven strategies that address struggling...

“It’s no bigger than it was two years ago,” Fuller said of the issue of blighted properties. “It’s just everyone’s decided they are paying attention. It’s kind of like the boiling frog thing. You don’t know you are (in) raising temperature until you hit the boil.

There was the beaded beauty from the 2010 Rock ’n’ Roll New Orleans Half Marathon, my first distance event. There was the heavy, ornate memento from the Marine Corps Marathon in 2012, my last distance event. In between was a compilation of collectibles from trail runs and road races for which I had trained for hours on end.

I have always envied those people who could pull off a week-long retreat between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day to reflect on life and make any course corrections for the upcoming year. Little did I know my first opportunity to be like them would come in a fifth-floor hospital room.