Catching Up

I haven't posted anything for a while - most of July, actually, but there's a halfway decent reason for that.

I had a heart attack on the morning of July 4th. Opinion varies on how serious it was, but at the very minimum, I hew to the line that there's no such thing as a minor heart attack.

Oh heck, let's do the whole chronology, shall we?

It turned out that I'd been experiencing angina for a couple of weeks but didn't know what it was, or perhaps didn't want to know what it was. On the night of the third the angina was pretty intense, but again I either didn't realize what it was, or chose to pretend I wasn't having some kind of heart problem. Most of the time the ache would be gone in the morning, but on the morning of the fourth the pain was worse. Much worse. It actually woke me up at about five or six in the morning, and I knew it wasn't a muscle thing any more.

Nevertheless, I took a shower and put on clean clothes, and hoped for the best. The pain was fairly bad and it radiated all the way down to my left wrist, and then I got nauseated and threw up like a firehose. That was the final straw. Jean came out of the office to see what was wrong, I told her I had chest and arm pain, and she said "Hospital."

We started to drive to the hospital because we live out in the sticks, but as we drove Jean called 911 and found that there's actually an ambulance stationed in Wittmann! They advised us to pull off and wait, so that's what we did, stopping at milepost 130 of US Highway 60. The pain by then was becoming quite quite unbearable - on the hallowed 0 to 10 scale, we were approaching a Spinal Tap-esque 11, and the continued vomiting didn't help either. I actually thought I was dying and would have to be scraped up off the side of the highway like roadkill...

The ambulance arrived, and they gave me oxygen, nitroglycerine and morphine on the way to Del Webb Hospital. This treatment cut the pain level in half and removed the sense of impending death, so by the time I got into the ER at Del Webb I didn't feel too bad. I still had chest pain and had picked up a dandy nitroglycerine headache, but things seemed to be improving.

The Del Webb ER staff treated me further, including injecting some clot-busting medication into my abdomen and fitting me with IV nitroglycerine. Soon the chest and arm pain were gone, but I felt like I had a strand of barbed wire twisted around my head. Cripes does nitroglycerine give one headaches!

Then it was off to the Cath Lab. The Cath Lab is kind of an intense experience. You're sedated, but not out. It's about like napping through a TV show; sometimes you hear things from the TV show and sometimes you don't. I remember feeling the bright, warm flashes in my chest as they released the dye (and I remember being astonished at how rapidly the blood seemed to flow outward). I remember a lot of pressure and manipulation in my right groin. And most of all, I remember the cardiologist suddenly saying "This man needs to be in the ICU immediately."

Oh shit!

Suddenly I was wide awake and felt everything they did to me in the Cath Lab. Wide awake and scared. Presently they plugged the hole in my femoral artery and wheeled me back to the ER. What ensued was a medical blitzkrieg - I suddenly had no end of top-shelf medical types in my little ER room, telling me what they'd found and laying out my options. At least three and perhaps five blockages in my coronary arteries, one of them about 95% blocked. A pattern of enzymes that suggested that I'd had a heart attack but that the clot-busting drugs had successfully ended the MI.

So it was decided that I would be transported to Boswell for emergency coronary bypass surgery the next day. As I waited to be moved, I became hugely nauseated. I'm not sure why, if it was a reaction to drugs or stress or dye or the Cath Lab or what, but I threw up in the ER, I threw up in the ambulance, and I threw up in the ICU at Boswell. The barf bags were completely inadequate, by the way, being far too small for the job at hand, so I ended up throwing up on myself a fair amount.

Once they gave me something for the nausea, I felt pretty good. Good enough to go home, actually, but that wasn't how it was going to play. I spent the rest of the day being prepped. They ran an ultrasound on my legs to locate choice vein segments. They shaved my chest and leg. They kept pumping me full of drugs. They wouldn't let me eat or drink.

So at about 10:00 the next morning off I went. They'd given me a sedative so I didn't feel too anxious, but it's still a bit scary, being wheeled off to a procedure that has a small but non-zero possibility of stroke or death. I remember thinking that I wished the doctors had given my family some of the same sedative; I was scared, sure, but they looked more scared than I felt.

I remember nothing of surgery. The last thing I remember was being lowered onto the operating table, which to my surprise had a raised rim around the outside, like a drip pan. I was tempted to make a joke about making my own gravy but the next thing I knew, someone was telling me to cough. I kept trying but my throat hurt, and every now and then there would be a terrible wet sucking sound. Then I heard a voice say "He initiated five times" and then they were pulling some horrible corrugated thing out of my throat. I coughed, or did they vacuum me out? I don't remember.

I came to some time later when a couple of nurses were trying to get me out of bed. I was awake, sort of, and hurt, sort of, but looking back on it, I was drifting along under a nice overcast of morphine...

This is getting long, isn't it? To be continued!