HEART HISTORY

HEART HISTORY

For the record, here's the way it went down from my perspective. Wednesday, December 6, 2000, I lifted weights for an hour starting at about 10 pm which was the norm. Nothing out of the ordinary happened while lifting. After I finished, I laid down on this love seat we had in the basement to watch something on television and fell asleep-I didn't mean to. The love seat was only 3/4 the sufficient length for me to lay down comfortably so my head was crooked up at a bad angle while my feet were up at the other end. When I woke up in the middle of the night and went to bed, I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

The next morning, while at work I started to get a tight feeling or mild pain in my chest. It was a little hard to breath. If there was a pain, it was in my left pec and also subscapular muscle(in the back). I took an ibuprophin at the office (I didn't know any better). The owner of our business had open heart surgery a few years ago, so he was very sensitive to the situation and insisted I be taken to the hospital. One guy drove me and another took my car.

At the ER, I received the usual heart attack treatment. A couple of aspirin, an EKG and continual questions about the severity of the pain. "On a scale of one to ten, ten being intense pain, what would you rate the pain now?" My co-workers and I were in the this little room making jokes and blowing up rubber gloves and harassing the nurses. Finally, I agreed that there was no pain (I would never have gotten out of there if I didn't) and the ER doctor said he thought from my EKG, which showed no heart problem, that I must have had a muscle strain. He suggested that a have a stress test with CT scan while I was at the hospital to make sure of his diagnosis.

They walked me over to another part of the hospital to take the stress test. I had never taken one before. I walked and jogged on the treadmill and the administering doctor asked me if I was on some medicine which kept my heart rate down -I wasn't, I was just in good shape. Eventually, they got me up close to where they wanted and took me in for the CT scan. The doctor said everything looked good and sent me home. That night was our company Christmas party. While I was getting ready, I got a call from the hospital asking me to come back in the morning so they could get a (resting) baseline CT scan.

I drank way too much wine at the Christmas party (which is my norm) and staggered in about 1 am. The next morning, I was at the hospital at 9 am for my test which only took a half hour or so and I went to the office. That's the last I thought about the episode until January 2, 2001.

Three weeks after the test, my family doctor informs me that someone at the hospital looked at my CT scan and sees an irregularity. Can you believe that? He says I should make an appointment with a heart specialist and have it checked out.

I call the one he suggests and take the first available appointment which is in about a week. Nice guy, this one - young but overweight. He checked me out; good blood pressure, slow steady heart rate, lean and muscular. He said he thought I had a muscle strain and the CT scan was probably a false positive. He gave me three choices: 1) have a different test (stress echo) to see if it showed the same thing 2) do an angiogram to tell definitively if there was a problem or 3) do nothing. He said any of the three would be ok with him. I chose the stress echo. He scheduled me for a month and a half out (the end of February). No big rush. He did the test and said it looked bad (much worse than he thought it would) and I should have an angiogram. OK, lets do it asap.

The first week of March I went to the hospital for the angiogram. They wheeled me in at about 11 am. Up on the screen, we looked at my heart. No real bad problem. One spot looks 20-30% blocked. Lets talk about it. We could treat this one small blockage with medicine or go in and do an angioplasty to open it up right away. I said, lets get it taken care of so I don't have to worry about it. I didn't realize he couldn't do the angioplasty. They wheeled me back to a room to wait for a surgeon to come from another hospital to do the work. I had to wait until about 6 pm. (Fun day) While I was waiting, the attending nurse said she couldn't believe they were doing an angioplasty when there was only 20-30% blockage. What did I know?

Afterwards, I saw the before and after pictures and hoped it was all worth it. They put in a 'new' medicated stent. I had to stay at the hospital overnight - had lifting and exercise restrictions for weeks afterwards. The only medication I was required to take was an 81 mg (baby) aspirin per day. I started cardiac rehab in May and ... that's another story.