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Edited on Thu Jun-28-07 05:42 PM by DFW
I knew my mom had high cholesterol, and my dad's parents
both died of heart attacks before they were 70. So, when
I felt a twinge in my left shoulder, I thought, what the
hell, I'll just ask a cardiologist to take a look. I found
one in the town where we keep a residence, and went to see
him. He told me he'd do an EKG on the spot, and see if there
was any irregularity. There was. He asked me to come back in
2 days for an echo stress test. I did. He said, OK, in my office.
That sounded bad. It was.
He said, OK, I'm calling up to the Krupp clinic in Essen (one of the
top cardiac clinics in northern Europe) to take you right away. I
asked is it THAT bad? He said it might be, and I couldn't afford to
take the chance. I said OK, I'm free as of Monday (this was Wednesday).
He said no, not Monday, not tomorrow, NOW, GET UP THERE, AND DO IT
NOW!!!!! I said, THAT bad? He said it might be, and I'm an idiot if
I take the risk by not doing it.
So, I said, OK, and up there I went. The next morning, the head
professor came in, looked at my chart and said, OK this guy comes
on at noon, clear my schedule. Ummm, right. Then an assistant doc
comes in with a horror list of all the things that can go wrong, and
I have to sign it, acknowledging that I know of the risks. They all
sound horrible, so I asked him if they couldn't just get me a pistol
and let me get it over with. He said, no, don't worry, NONE of that
stuff had EVER happened, but they were required by law, etc etc. OK,
I signed. Then they took me down to the OR. You get a local anasthetic
at your hip, and then the head doc goes in to your artery there. You
really don't feel much. Then he says, OK, I'm fooling around in your heart,
here. Since you don't have any nerves in your heart, you don't know it.
I said, OK, whatever you say. Then he said now you're gonna feel warm, but
it'll go away in 15 seconds. Suddenly I felt like a Maytag and someone hit
warm rinse, but he was right, it was gone in 15 seconds. They have a device
that can then see if you have any clogged arteries, since that warm stuff they
sprayed into your system is mildly radioactive, and shows up on their TV
monitor. You are completely awake the whole time, so it's best you keep
a calm head. With me, he started telling the assistant to bring him a couple
of stents. I said uh-oh. He said no sweat so far. this was the point when
his attention was the most focused, but after 5 minutes, he said, OK, you're cool.
I asked in what respect? He said I was the luckiest man in Europe that day.
He played back the tape of the procedure, and I had 2 anterior coronary arteries
99% blocked. I was basically a walking corpse waiting to go horizontal. The
stents freed up the flow, and he said (in English this time) "just in time."
He then told me that because I had gotten there before having a heart attack,
there was no damage to the heart muscle, and I should be OK. I was lucky that
the blockage was not in a place that stents couldn't help, or else I would have
been rushed by ambulance for an emergency bypass (Bill Clinton style).
He then said see ya tomorrow, and the assistants put a pressure bandage on my
hip where they had gone in, and said it needed to stay there for 24 hours, and
told me to drink a lot to flush the radioactive stuff out. I was in the recovery
room for a few hours, and then brought back to my room that afternoon. The next
day, they called my wife up and told us the new law of the world: my system does
not break down LDL (the bad cholesterol), so I needed a drastic change of diet.
No more: eggs, cheese, meat (except poultry), shellfish, cooking with butter
or ice cream (sherbet is OK). Basically--if it tastes good, spit it out.
They let me out 48 hours after I was operated on--if you can call it that. I
wasn't cut up, and I was awake throughout the whole thing, shooting the breeze
with these people that were fooling around with my ticker the whole time, and
the whole thing took about an hour and 15 minutes.
Now let me explain the hard part: I LOVE cheese, shellfish, ice cream, etc etc.
You don't know the agony of not having had a piece of pizza for 3 years. But I
do know the joy of having lived for these past 3 years, and somehow, it lets me
watch others eat their pizza with just a little less jealousy.
So let them snake their thingy up your artery, it's no big deal. If they have
to do anything or put in a stent, that's cool, too. A bypass is a radically
invasive surgery. If you can get away with not having it, it's worth it. You'll
be up and outta there in 2 days max, and be alive to tell the tale, too. I was
supposed to keep a date with the grim reaper on or about April 29th, 2004. Instead
I'm still travelling all over the world, still telling HQ I'm not ready for a desk
job back home. The snaking up your artery is by far the better option, take from
one who has been there, and almost wasn't anywhere any more.
That can't be all bad, can it?
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