I recently turned 70 and got the best birthday present ever – a new lease on life.
What I had self-diagnosed as industrial-strength heartburn turned out to be something else entirely. Only the persistence of my doctor led to the correct diagnosis. While I noticed the heartburn came and went, depending on whether I was walking uphill, she saw the whole picture and signed me up for a stress test, which uses a treadmill to gauge when the “heartburn” occurred and take a high-tech photo of what was happening with my heart.
In doing that, she probably saved my life.
What a cardiologist initially found in the photo was a blockage in one of the main arteries leading to my heart. For obvious reasons, when blocked, that artery is called “the widow maker.”
Another cardiologist would follow up by inserting a tiny camera into an artery in my left wrist and maneuver it to my heart looking for other blockages. If the blockages were minor he could insert tiny expandable metal tubes called stents that would allow more blood flow and avoid the need for further surgery.
Instead, he found four blockages, ranging from 80% to 95%.
I can’t print in a family newspaper what I thought when he told me that. You fill in the blanks.
I was teetering on the verge of a major-league heart attack, possibly in the next few weeks or months.
When they talked with me, the first question the doctors had asked wasn’t what I ate or how much I exercised. It was whether my family had a history of heart problems. Both my dad and my brother died of heart problems in their early to mid-70s. My genes were conspiring against me.
The doctors all agreed that I needed bypass surgery – technically called a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft – which is performed on about 400,000 Americans each year, according to the National Institutes of Health.
They called in the heavy-hitters, kind of a surgical Top Gun team that would saw my breastbone open, stop my heart, “harvest” a vein from my left leg and stitch it into place as four bypasses around the blockages. Then they would restart my heart and wire my breastbone back together.
Easy-peasy.
I wasn’t keeping track, but my wife tells me the surgery took nine hours.
The first thing I saw when I woke up were fairies. They were everywhere. My wife, nurses, aides, doctors – all of them were tracking every beat of my newly rebuilt arteries and heart.
Recovery was slow at first, but after a few days I was getting up for walks around the hospital floor. Using a walker and trailing a rack of intravenous solutions and drugs, I would shuffle down the hallway. Every day the nurse or an aide nudged me to go farther. By the time I was sent home five days after the surgery, I was lapping the entire floor.
When my wife and I got home, more fairies had been at work – the lawn was mowed, the house was cleaned, and a huge “Welcome Home” banner was strung across the front porch. I cannot say how good that made an old guy feel.
Recovery continues, and I’m now doing well enough to work from home part-time. Every day I walk around the house or head outside for a short walk around the yard, or across the street to the cemetery where my brother is buried, a stark reminder of what might have been.
At the ripe old age of 70, I consider myself lucky. Like everyone else, I don’t know how long I’ll be riding planet Earth during its annual circumnavigations of the sun, but I’ve pledged to savor every day with a heart full of thanks.
Carl Sampson is a writer and editor. He lives in Stayton.
