Published: February 3, 2026
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
When dawn breaks over Nelson County, Kentucky, there’s a particular peace that settles into the timber. It’s the hour when the woods wake slowly, first with a far-off crow call, then the chatter of squirrels, followed by the soft stirring of light coming through the trees.
For 66-year-old Bobby Williamson, also known as “Bobcat,” those sounds have been the rhythm of his life since he was 6 years old. Hunting wasn’t just something he did; it shaped the seasons of his year, the memories of his family and the way he understood the world.
But a few years ago, Bobby wasn’t sure he’d ever hear those woods come alive again.
“I was just about gone,” Bobby said. “I was so tired and weak. All my muscle mass was gone.”
Grief weighed on him just as heavily, because his only son had passed way six months earlier at 37 years old. Bobby’s will to live was slipping away, until a question from his doctor reminded him about something more. The doctor was suggesting Bobby try a left ventricular assist device (LVAD), an internal pump to help his heart.
“He said, ‘What would your son want?’” Bobby said. “And that convinced me to do the LVAD. I had no will to live, but that did it.”
An LVAD is a mechanical pump surgically implanted in people with severe heart failure to help the heart’s left ventricle pump blood to the body. In the months leading up to his LVAD surgery, Bobby was barely able to rise from a chair.
The surgery in April 2023 wasn’t easy. Bobby spent five weeks in the hospital and went through a difficult recovery as he worked with the late Kelly C. McCants, M.D., who was a cardiologist and executive medical director of the Norton Heart & Vascular Institute Advanced Heart Failure & Recovery Program.
But Bobby promised himself that come fall, he was going deer hunting.
“At Norton Healthcare, they are a great team,” Bobby said. “They work with you.”
His care team had some concerns, between the LVAD and a pacemaker, considering the need to protect the device site and the recoil of firing a rifle left-handed. But hunting was why Bobby wanted to keep living.
“Hunting is my life; I didn’t go through [all this] to live in a bubble,” Bobby said.
And when the fall hunting season came in 2023, Bobby returned to where he belonged. While Bobby was careful and made sure he had a fresh set of batteries for his LVAD, his first hunting experience since the surgery ended the right way.
He harvested a buck. Although that first deer after surgery wasn’t the biggest he’d ever taken, it may have been the most meaningful.
Since then, he hasn’t missed a season.
Bobby hunts with the same passion and appreciation he’s had for decades. At deer camp, where the same crew of friends has gathered for 42 straight years, he’s back to cooking wild game and swapping stories.
This past season, Bobby brought home bragging rights too. He won the camp’s annual big-buck pot, taking home $330.
“It sure made my year,” Bobby said.
What keeps him going isn’t just the hunt. It’s the connection of memories of his father taking him through the woods as a boy, and the joy of watching his own son take his first deer at 11 years old, and later seeing his grandson do the same at just 7. The stillness is where he prays, thinks and sorts through life’s challenging moments.
For others facing he same uphill climb he did, Bobby offers simple advice.
“Don’t give up everything just because you’ve got an LVAD. Enjoy living,” Bobby said. “Take it slow, but get out there.”
Because for him, life is still found in those early mornings, listening to the central Kentucky woods wake up, one sound at a time.
Norton Heart & Vascular Institute is a leading provider of comprehensive cardiology care in Kentucky, Louisville and southern Indiana, and our specialists see more than 137,000 patients a year.