When Doctors Collide (#9)

I Once Enjoyed Playing "HEARTS" (a simple game of cards)

So, what can I say?  I have never been as good to my body as I should have been…if it is a temple, it is a crumbled temple, like the piles of old stone and wood we sometimes find when poking around in abandoned towns out west.  But my temple has been the opposite:  over-fed, poorly maintained though I have never been obese, and suffering from the smoke I inhaled for way too many years.  Well, this is what the cardiologist found and how he found it:

My Angiogram and Other Examinations

Dr. C, my cardiologist, listens to my heart.  The part of the stethoscope that touches me is cold and hard though Dr. C is quite nice and affable.  He listens to my chest and to my carotid and other arteries.  He makes little noises like hmmm and mmm and even, damn, moves down to check the arteries in my ankle.  The conclusion is that I am ripe for an angiogram, the “gold standard” for checking my heart and arteries.

My angiogram is interesting.  Lying on a hospital OR bed, I am not fully asleep for the thing and can see the interior of the arteries and can see something like an image of my own heart pumping.  The room seems incredibly cold but that is largely an effect of the drugs. I confess that the half sleep reminds me much too much of the sixties as my eyes focus and refocus and my heart, visible on the crt keeps pumping with the iambic rhythms of systole and diastole.  Heart’s fine, says Dr. C, but the arteries…  The arteries, yes, the arteries.

How I Got This Way

My bad dining habits (only away from home, Susan has always prepared heart-healthy meals) have resulted in almost complete blockage of four different arteries, one of them at 98%.  In a week, I am supposed to have a quadruple bypass.  I really blame southern fried cooking but the blame is my own for eating it:  fried chicken, French fries, chicken fried steak, hamburgers, fried fish, shrimp and oysters with hushpuppies, so much more.  But…

Ooops!  We forgot about...

Well, there’s always a “but,” isn’t there?  The good news is that I have never, ever, had an actual heart attack.  My heart has continued beating healthily, blissfully unaware that the arteries have blockage.  But that’s not the “but” in question.  The “but” that faces us (my doctors and me) is that I also have a subdural hematoma that sits passively in my brain pan, slowly healing itself.

So, what’s wrong with that?  Open heart surgery is accompanied by massive quantities of blood thinners.  Blood thinners do what?  Right!  They make the blood thinner.  Making the blood thinner makes it easier for the blood to flow into my brain and settle into my brain pan.  So, should we have the heart surgery now?  Or should we wait for the subdural hematoma to heal itself.  The lady or the tiger?  Which door should we open?  Cindy and Carl Darnell, very nice people from Oregon, send me a T-shirt that says “Growing Old Isn’t for Sissies.”  I am convinced that living itself is not for sissies.

We Reach a Conclusion

In a few days, we (what is this “we” stuff, I mean the doctors.  “We” is doctor and nurse speak usually meaning “you.”  “How are we this morning?  Did we sleep well?”  In this case, the “we” means about five doctors conferring with each other and maybe even having harsh words.) have come to some kind of agreement:  I will have the heart surgery and we will monitor the subdural hematoma.  You must, by now, have come to some kind of understanding of how long-suffering and special Susan is.  I would probably have walked out on me years earlier!

 More soon:  The surgery its ownself