Heart Surgery

I've had a couple of requests to show the pictures from my recent heart episode.  Thanksgiving night, about 9:00 p.m., as I was lounging innocently in my recliner, channel surfing, my heart decided to start dancing a jig.  At first I thought it might be a Diabetic Incident, but because of the nature of the day, I knew my blood sugar wasn't low, even though I was starting to get clammy.  Since the possibilities were more likely that my sugar was high, I took a pill to lower it.  It didn't make any difference in how I felt.  Usually, I would have noticed the difference within a couple of minutes.

Instead, I started to feel a large weight on my upper chest, and my upper arms began to feel as if there were tournequettes on both arms.  Right away, I said to myself, "I know what this is!"  So I got up and went in the other room and got out an aspirin and took it.  On the way back to the chair, I unlocked the front door so the paramedics could get in if I had to call them.  After that, it was all I could do to even get back to my recliner.  My arms felt like they were going to fall off, and my knees kept wanting to buckle under and not hold me up.  I felt a little dizzy - not the kind of dizzy where you feel the room spinning around you from side to side - the kind where you feel you are tumbling head over heals, forward down a hill.

I finally made it back to the chair and sat down and reclined immediately.  After waiting another five minutes or so to see if the aspirin would help me feel better, I realized I should probably call someone.

My first thought was to call 911, but I was afraid of looking like an alarmist.  I had done that a couple of times before, with heart attack-like symptoms.  The first time it turned out to be my gall bladder, and the second time was actually a kidney infection.  Granted, they are both also fairly serious problems, but were not heart attacks, so I didn't want to call with another "false alarm".  So I thought of calling my sister, who is a retired nurse, and who has a genetic condition of Cardiac Asthma.  Our maternal grandfather had died of it, and we have a cousin who also has it.  Naturally I thought this might be connected to that, since I already have "regular" Asthma.  But I knew instantly that if I called her and told her what was happening, she would say, "What are you doing talking to me?  Hang up and call 911!"   So I did just that, I dialed 911.

When I gave the operator my symptoms, he simply said, "They are on their way", and stayed on the line with me until they arrived.  I could hear the sirens coming, and mentioned, "I wish they hadn't done THAT!"  By then, they were in the neighborhood and the sirens had stopped.

When the Paramedics did the EKG and send the feed to the nearest hospital, the doctor on duty told them not to bother bringing me there, as I was going to have to be admitted, so to take me directly to the largest hospital in the area, that is known for being the best heart facility.  So that's where we went.

They called my daughter to tell her where I was going and what was happening.  She became the relay person between me and her husband and brother, who were with my husband and some grandsons at a basketball game.  Within a couple of hours, all my children who were in town (4 of them) and my husband arrived in the E.R.  After all the well-wishes and my assurances I was fine, and they could go about their holiday fun (most of it was to do with shopping) my husband and I settled down to wait while the doctors and nurses decided what had happened and what to do with me.

Around 3:30 am they finally admitted me and sent me to a private room, which I recognized instantly as an I.C.U. unit.  Then I started to get scared.  My husband was good at calming me down and reminding me I was in very good hands, the best heart facility in the West.  I had to admit they did a good job of making me feel taken care of, and that they knew what they were doing.

Later that morning, around 10:30 or so, they took me into a special operating room-sort of place, and performed what they used to call an angio-gram, but now that's out-dated.  They inserted a stent in the collapsed vessel on the surface of the heart, by going through the artery, entering at the groin.

The first picture is from "before", where they marked the collapsed areas and the clog.  The "after" picture shows the vein opened, and you can see the spiral of the little spring-shaped stent, left there to hold the walls of the vein open.  It will eventually become a permanent part of the vein.

They said there are several other places that could go any time, so I need to be careful, and try to get my heart healthy - watch my cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.  It's still slow going, but I can tell it's going.  I am gradually getting stronger every day, and some days I feel like I'm starting to lose a little weight, but there's no real evidence of that yet.

Take care of yourselves!