Video: Fred Hoiberg’s first steps to recovery

This 12-second video of Fred Hoiberg walking in the Mayo Clinic surfaced on the Internet Monday.

Hoiberg tweeted it out Monday with this one-word message attached: #progress

Nothing important gets done without a first step.

As all of us know, hospitals are humbling places. No matter who you are or who you've done, wearing a hospital gown and being helped as you use a walker reminds you you're always extremely fragile and vulnerable, and no one should never take health for granted.

Hoiberg, the Iowa State men's basketball coach, already knew that. He had heart surgery almost a decade ago to replace an aortic root. That enlarged root was almost the end of him. It put a premature halt to his NBA playing career, which had spanned 10 seasons. He thought he had another five or six years to go. He had a pacemaker implanted in his left shoulder.

It would seem he's lived as carefully and intelligently as possible given he has a mighty stressful occupation. His demeanor has always been cool, but to stay that way on the sidelines of a major-college basketball game can't be easy.

Last Friday at Mayo Clinic, Hoiberg had heart surgery again. He had his aortic valve replaced. When he took the ISU job five years ago he knew the day would come when that would be necessary, and it did.

Serious stuff. He'll be away from work from 4-6 weeks. In his extraordinarily competitive world, that's a long time.

But it's good to be alive, a sentiment that would be echoed by Hoiberg's boss, Jamie Pollard. The ISU athletic director had a heart attack in March. He's on the mend.

I've had a couple of surgeries, for shoulder and hernia. Neither were anything approaching the seriousness of heart surgery, thankfully. But I learned what people meant when they say it's only a minor surgery when it happens to someone else.

Rehabbing the shoulder was a painful and kind of lonely process, and it made me appreciate what athletes with serious injuries endure. No one is on the sideline cheering for you while you're in physical therapy.

I hate hospital gowns. You put one on, and your dignity seems to walk out the front door without you. But the people who work in those hospitals are geniuses and angels rolled into one, heroic figures who walk among us in relative anonymity.

Get well soon, Fred, and everyone else out there with health challenges in front of them.