Facing the medicine
Posted by Dennis Anderson on Apr 2nd, 2008
I’ve had another “procedure.”
I went through 40-plus years of life with just a broken bone here and a sniffle there. Since then, my medical chart reads like this:
• Deviated septum surgery.
• Hernia.
• Vasectomy.
• Type 2 diabetes diagnosis.
• Rotator cuff (and not on my pitching wing).
And there have been all the related tests — sleep study, blood workups, X-ray, etc.
The latest procedure was an angiogram.
It all started out innocently with a routine physical. After the requisite poking and prodding, the doctor and I got down to talking about my list of concerns this year. It was a short list, but included some chest discomfort, usually when stressed. I’ve been experiencing it for years. I think they call it anxiety.
My dad dropped dead of a heart attack at 46 (my age), so the doc suggested that I have a stress test. “I doubt if we would find anything, but let’s just be safe,” he said.
Six days later, a Monday, I’m on the treadmill, kicking butt after spending the past year running and losing 40 pounds along the way.
The treadmill went well, I thought, despite a dull pain in my left chest during a resting portion of the test.
“Your doctor will call you with the results in about a week,” the technician said as I left.
On Tuesday, a nurse left a voicemail on my cell phone saying that the test showed some concerns and that she scheduled an appointment with a cardiologist for the next morning. “I hope you can make it,” she added.
Did she mean make the appointment or wake up tomorrow?
I was devastated. Julie, my wife, said she was relieved.
“What?” I said.
“Well, if they find anything wrong they can fix it,” she said matter-of-factly. “Better now than after a heart attack.”
She didn’t calm my nerves.
Julie accompanied me to the cardiologist’s office the next morning. The doctor quickly got to the heart of the matter. A colleague of his from Kansas City is in town on Friday and he had scheduled him to do my angiogram. There it was, my latest procedure. This one, however, had frosting on top.
He expected the colleague to put a stent into at least one of my arteries. Then he left to write up some prescriptions and give some orders to the nurse.
I looked at Julie and she was smiling.
All I could think of were the words I had just heard: balloon, incision, artery, stent, etc. I threw in a few of my own: death, life insurance and grandchildren I’ll never see.
Friday came. The doctor who was about to cut into my groin to access my femoral artery was no relief. “I usually don’t like to do heart surgery here, but if I have to I will,” he said. “You never know what you will find when we start looking.”
The medical team carted me into the operating room. It was freezing in there. Soon, they were giving me medication to calm me and deaden the area of the incision. About 15 minutes later I was back in the recovery room, ready for a nice long nap.
I was fine. No arteries were blocked more than 10 or 15 percent; balloons and stents are used at 20 percent or more.
“I’m good for another 10 or 15 years,” the doctor told Julie.
Well, at least until my next procedure.
at 9:47 a.m.
I'm with Julie--it is good to know what is going on. Kind of like driving, you obey the speed limit, warning signals, keep the car tuned and it's open road ahead.