Cathy Brown has spent the past year saying goodbye to her young sons. She has written them journals, packed with motherly advice and kind words.

She tells them how to be good fathers and husbands.

 "Talk to your children. Look them in the eye and tell them how smart they are," the diaries tell her 11-year-old twins, Ty and Shane.

 "Tell your wife she's the most beautiful woman you've ever laid your eyes on."

 Brown knows these thoughts can't wait.

 In February 2001, the 39-year-old Las Vegan was diagnosed with constrictive pericarditis, a rare form of heart disease. Brown's heart is slowly being encased with a cementlike substance. Each day, the organ is squeezed a little harder.

 Experts say Brown's only hope for long-term survival is a difficult and sometimes dangerous surgical procedure that involves ripping the hard, plaster like substance from her heart without tearing the heart muscle itself.

 "If I don't have the surgery, I'll die," Brown said. "I have to do it. The question is just when am I going to have the nerve? If I stay at home instead, there's a good chance I'll wake up tomorrow and get to see my husband and kids."

But with each tomorrow, Brown's ailing heart takes a toll on the rest of her body. The heart has trouble circulating blood sent to it from her liver, spleen and kidneys. As a result, excess blood backs up and adds pressure to her organs, causing her stomach to distend.

"We're really worried about how this disease can affect the surrounding organs," said Bruce Lytle, a heart surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, to which Brown has been traveling for care.

Brown's doctors have told her that if she wants to stave off the surgery, she'll have to stay at home and remain off her feet. Any exertion can make it even more difficult for her heart to pump blood.

They're not sure why she has the disease, which usually occurs in people over 60. One theory is a virus Brown came down with when she was 19 may have damaged her heart and caused it to begin calcifying.

According to Dr. Chris Appleton, chair of the division of cardiovascular diseases at the Mayo clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., most cardiologists in private practice will see maybe one case of constrictive pericarditis in their lifetime.

"In the old days, the most common cause of the disease was tuberculosis. Now, the most common cause in the U.S. is from bleeding and problems after bypass surgery."

According to one of Brown's cardiologists from Cleveland, Dr. Allan Klein, it's difficult to determine the prognosis for patients with constrictive pericarditis. It depends on how and when it was contracted. Success in surgery also depends on how severe the calcification is and how embedded it is into the heart muscle.

Brown said she has been traveling to Cleveland for care because most Las Vegas doctors have little experience with her disease.

She said she's terrified to have the surgery. The few other pericarditis patients she has been in contact with who went through the procedure are now dead.

"It's tough to find others with this disease, but I did find a few other couples over the Internet," she said. "One man's heart was cut up so much it fell apart on the operating table, and the other man died the next day. I haven't heard one positive story from any patients.”

Brown and her husband, Ned, have been married for 16 years and have spent most of their lives in Las Vegas. The couple own and operate a marketing company, selling private resort memberships to recreational vehicle owners.

Brown's sons know how sick their mom is and say they don't mind staying home with her more often. Brown said she used to Rollerblade, go fishing and ride horseback with the boys, fifth-graders at Roger Bryan Elementary School.

"Now we all just pile in the bed together and rent movies or play games," she said.

Although the boys don't have their complete journals yet, each has the first page framed and hanging in their rooms.

The journals are about 50 pages each and get longer every day. Ty's journal is blue with a big red heart and picture of a key on the cover. A handwritten message reads, "The Story of You." She's writing a journal for her husband as well.

"Even though she has this heart problem, she's always telling us she loves us," Ty said. "We used to go out and have lots of fun, but now we don't do that so much anymore."

The family sold their two-story home to save Brown the walk up the stairs. They also have sold their rental property and have liquidated their retirement savings to pay for more than $100,000 in medical care. It's unclear how much the heart surgery will cost, because so many different complications can occur during the procedure.

The boys plan on going with their parents when Brown decides to go through with the surgery. They have known about the disease since she was diagnosed. Brown found out about her heart after she saw a doctor for fatigue and excessive fluid retention. She wanted to have a hysterectomy, and her doctor recommended a complete checkup to ensure she was in good health before undergoing surgery.

"We told the boys the day we found out,” Brown said. "My husband started crying, I started crying and then the boys came in and started crying. We couldn't keep it from them."

Although Brown wants to postpone the surgery, her doctors say the chances of success decrease if her heart problem continues to worsen.

"Cathy is in the moderate range now, but if she continues to wait for surgery, it may be harder to scrape off," Klein said. "If she wanted to wait six months, it probably wouldn't change much; but then again, in one year, the calcification on her heart grew 2 millimeters more."

Most of Brown's heart is now covered with a 12 millimeter thick coating of the substance. Klein believes her surgery should be a success. The caveat, though, is that it's difficult to tell how serious the calcification really is until she's opened up.

"If the calcium has been there for a long time, like perhaps in Cathy's case, it can actually grow into the muscle of the heart, making it more difficult to remove," he said.

Appleton said the heart can get "really beat up" in the operating room.

"It doesn't just pop off like the shell off a nut," he said. "You have to take a scalpel and separate the calcification from the heart muscle. The surgery is really quite dramatic."

Ultimately, Brown expects to take that step in the next few months. For now, she spends much of her time in bed, taking medications to combat pain and fluid buildup.

"Whenever my heart beats, it slams up against this cement wall and it hurts," she said. At night, when everyone else is in bed or asleep, Brown writes in the journals. She plans to pass them out before the operation.

"I just can't sleep because it reminds me of death," she said. "I don't want to miss anything, and I don't want to waste any more of my life sleeping. But sometimes I hear the boys crying at night, and I know they are worrying."

In the journals, Brown tells her sons how much she loves them. She writes about nice things they did that day or sweet things they told her.

"I want them to know that even if I'm not here for them to talk to anymore, I'll only really die if they stop talking about me and stop remembering me," she said. "I want them to know that I will always be with them."