There’s a vine that needs trimming on Tom Tolbert’s roof. It’s an assignment he would savor, tricky and satisfying as he saves himself a few bucks, but Tolbert’s roof-climbing days are over.

In his new life, a great deal has changed.

Tolbert is back on the job as one of the most popular sports talk-show hosts in Bay Area history, anchoring KNBR’s 3 to 7 p.m. slot alongside John Lund with his customary wit and perspective. He sounds as if everything is fine in the wake of an emergency heart operation in August, and a recent visit to his Alameda home found him in great spirits, laughter filling the room as a dog and two kittens playfully scrapped for territory.

It’s just that Tolbert, 52, walks a fine line in his recovery from his surgery, a thoracic aortic dissection. The odds were heavily against him surviving the initial operation to repair a tear in the body’s largest artery, and he required three subsequent procedures to ward off complications.

There were times this fall when the former NBA player was unable to walk more than a few steps before retreating in exhaustion. “It’s all about my blood pressure now,” he said. “Maintain that at a proper level, they tell me. Be kind to the aorta.”

Tolbert was at home watching a Giants baseball game at around 9 p.m. on Aug. 29 when he suddenly felt pain in both of his temples.

“I’m thinking, what the hell is that?” he recalled. “Then both of my shoulder blades started hurting, and then my chest and throat were throbbing. I thought I was having a heart attack, so I got on the computer and Googled the symptoms. They weren’t associated with a heart attack, but I knew something was wrong.”

Shivering cold but drenched in sweat, he went upstairs to climb in bed with his wife, Lorrie, who had turned in early that night.

“I heard this faint voice,” Lorrie Tolbert said of being awakened by her husband. “‘Sugar,’ ... that’s what we call each other, ‘I don’t feel very good.’ Tom has an unbelievably high threshold for pain, so I knew it was bad. We got down to Alameda Hospital in a hurry. They ran a series of tests, and when the doctor came in, he said, ‘It’s your aorta. You’re going to need surgery. Immediately. Tonight.’”

Tom remembered Lorrie being calm through this episode, which led to a high-speed ambulance ride to Stanford Hospital. “I mentioned our three kids,” said Lorrie, referring to Weston, 22; Walker, 20; and Hailey, 16. “The nurse said, ‘Yes, you definitely want the kids to come. It’s life-threatening.’”

That ambulance ride said a great deal about Tolbert and his demeanor. He could have been quite the boastful boor at this stage of his life, having been a high-profile player at the University of Arizona and a seven-year veteran of the NBA, including three memorable seasons as a 6-foot-7 power forward under Warriors coach Don Nelson in the early 1990s.

He’s a rare and endearing brand of talk-show host, combining the authoritative voice of an ex-athlete with a fan’s ceaseless devotion. But there isn’t a trace of cockiness or self-obsession in his manner, on or off the air — and his first reaction, to just about anything, is humor.

“So we’re buzzing down to Stanford, and I noticed that they’d handcuffed my gurney to the side of the ambulance. So I had ’em take a picture with me giving the thumbs-up: ‘They finally got me,’” he laughed. When Tolbert got to the surgery room, being introduced to all sorts of people, he borrowed a line from the movie “Animal House” to greet them all: “Tom Tolbert, rush chairman, damn glad to meet you.”

“I just think there are only so many things you can control in your life,” Tolbert said. “There’s nothing I can do about surgery, so I might as well be as loose as I can, have some fun with it. I’ve always had that ability when something’s out of my hands. Here we’ve got this team of surgeons, and they’re the best. I just kept thinking, ‘They’re gonna get this done.’”

Afterward, Tolbert got the grim news that “there were a number of ways it could have gone worse than it did. My doctor said if the dissection had gone upward, toward the heart, instead of downward, I would have died. And he said, ‘If I didn’t already have you opened up when the dissection happened, you’re probably done.’”

About a week after returning home, Tolbert taped an upbeat message for his KNBR listeners to hear. He was back in the studio on Oct. 9, and for the past two months, he’s been able to drive himself to his workplace of 21 years. He felt about the same during those first few shows, but he didn’t look it, having lost nearly 40 pounds (down to 255) through the ordeal.

“That’s the first thing that jumped out, like, whoa!” Lund said, recalling the sight of a slimmed-down Tolbert. “A few things were different. We had to make sure he had a convenient parking place, and sometimes he has to get up during the show to keep the blood circulating. But, basically, it’s like he never left. We’ve quit asking about his energy, because it’s always high. That great sense of humor never left him.

“I mean, about two weeks in, he was sitting there making death jokes. That’s Tom. He made death funny.”

Warriors coach Steve Kerr, a longtime friend dating to their playing days at Arizona, recalled their first conversation after the surgery: “He said, ‘Yeah, I was looking for ways to lose weight. I thought about diet. I thought about exercise. Then I just settled on heart surgery. It’s worked out really well.’ Typical Tom. Incredible outlook. Most of his life is based on sports and humor and people and friends. He’s just a beautiful human being.”

Lorrie recognized that great quality in her husband, but she was deeply shaken by his postsurgical condition. “From the perspective of seeing Tom as this big, solid, brawny guy, it was pretty dramatic and emotional for me,” she said, right about the time Tom pulled up his shirt to reveal a foot-long, vertical scar running down his abdomen. “I’m still feeling the effects of what happened. It’s incredibly stressful. You don’t feel it for the first few weeks, and then your world kind of falls apart a little bit.”

Nobody was quite prepared for the debilitating condition of his legs — not even his doctors, because the chance of surviving his initial operation was so low. “They’ve had to get creative,” said Lorrie. “After three more operations (all at Stanford), you wonder if he’ll ever be able to walk normally again.”

Tolbert recalled “just trying to walk around the kitchen, into the dining room and do a full circle, maybe four times. Then I had to rest for three or four minutes and do it again, just to keep my muscles intact.” After the last procedure — his fourth in seven weeks — he actually felt worse, he said. “I could barely make it from the street to the house. My quads were killing me; I just felt done.”

When he woke the following morning, though, there was only a bit of pain. He was able to walk around the kitchen 10 times, he said. “It was like a miracle to me. It was such a breakthrough, I started crying.

“And I remember needing to get out and walk outside. It was right around the time of the Santa Rosa fires, so the air was filled with soot and smoke, but I got out there, walked about 100 yards down the street and was so happy. That’s all I wanted.”

Tolbert said he walks up to 5 miles at a stretch now, four or five times a week, and hopes he might return to playing golf at some point.

To maintain the proper level of blood flow, doctors inserted several stents in his coronary arteries to keep them open; they are likely to remain in place for the rest of his life. Because his condition can only be monitored, not healed, and the high risk of aneurysm, he is focused on a proper diet and maintaining low blood pressure.

As such, Tolbert has been forced to abandon a life of heavy weightlifting, Friday night pizza dinners and the joy of consuming whatever he wanted.

“Sodium is the big thing I have to avoid, and I’m at the store reading every label now,” he said. “And beer is OK, thank God. In fact, my doctor told me, ‘Make sure you have your seven to 10 beers a week, it’s actually good for you.’ And I was like, ‘Can I have seven this Saturday?’ Uh, no, that’s not how it works.”

When an inevitable question arose — what brought this on? — Tolbert didn’t need much thought.

“Basically, I’ve turned into my dad,” he said.

According to Lorrie, 78-year-old Tom Tolbert Sr. has had 22 procedures over the years, all related to the aorta.

“You think Tom’s scar is nasty; his dad’s runs completely top to bottom. So we’re in the middle of genetic testing right now, to find out for sure if all our kids need to be monitored,” she said. “We learned there’s a mutated genetic gene that causes dissection, and we’re trying to find out everything we can.”

As Tolbert sat talking about his future, he dropped his carefree facade.

“I’m so grateful to have my kids, my friends and my wife taking care of every little thing,” he said. “I really believe it helps the healing process when you have those types of vibes coursing through your body. I mean, I don’t get through any of this without Lorrie. She’s the best. I just love her to death.”

Lorrie, seated nearby, walked over and planted a big kiss on her man.

Bruce Jenkins is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: bjenkins@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Bruce_Jenkins1