Tag: Health

Life On Hold

Well, I guess I’m not doing Horrordailies as much as Horror-On-Days-I-Can.

My head has been elsewhere this past week: The CT angiogram I mentioned in my last entry revealed a little trouble brewing, so I will have a heart catheterization with possible angioplasty and stent placement on Thursday the 16th.

This procedure is generally low risk and they usually send you home the same day as long as nothing goes wrong. But I am nervous about this because when they placed a stent placed at the midpoint of the same pesky artery the night I had my heart attack, I almost died when the heart went into v-tach, an irregular rhythm at the bottom of the heart that doesn’t allow the heart to fill with enough blood between beats. Now they need to look at the top of the artery because the potential problem is in the “widowmaker” position and I am worried about the same thing happening again.

I’m not in imminent danger in that the blockage is only 40%, which is considered mild, believe it or not. However, the plaque is the soft sticky kind that is prone to rupturing. If it ruptures, the body sends clotting soldiers to the site of the wound, you get a blood clot in your heart, and you have a heart attack—which is exactly what happened two years ago when the midpoint of the artery was 40-60% blocked.

With a work trip coming up in November, the approaching holidays, and having to find a new place to live and then pack up and move by the end of the year, I needed this like a hole in the head. But if they do place a stent and all goes well, chances are that it won’t be my heart that gets me in the end: The rest of the heart looks pretty good and the stress test I had in August showed that the heart is functioning very well. In fact, the tech looked at me and said, “You said you had a heart attack? Wow, it’s like nothing ever happened.” Enough clinicians from my cardiologist to my internist to emergency department physicians to cardiac nurses have made similar comments that I trust my heart is not weak or failing.

Think of it like a car: Everything may be running well, but if the fuel injector gets clogged, there will be engine misfires, poor acceleration, and hard starts. You want to fix it before the “check engine” light goes on and you stall out.

Halloween pumpkins carved to show car warning lights such as check oil and check engine.
Truly terrifying.

If they do place a stent, as long as there are no problems, it’s an outpatient procedure or a one-night stay in the hospital for observation, at most. One guy in my cardiac rehab class a couple of years ago had five placed at once and went home that evening. A few days of rotting on the couch, a week of not lifting anything, and then life goes on, work trip, packing, and move. Getting a stent would require three months of cardiac rehab and a year back on the antiplatelet medication that had me bruised like I played hockey without protective gear, but that’s all manageable.

Still, not fun. Unfortunately, I’ll have to be awake, if slightly sedated, for the procedure. Medical stuff generally doesn’t gross me out or make me queasy. I just don’t want to be awake if something goes south and then be aware of all the ensuing commotion as they try to keep me from kicking the bucket right there on the table. The last time I had a cath, I was out cold from the heart attack. I’m hoping I don’t remember any of it this time either.

And now I’d like a word with the internet at large. While I was preparing to write this entry, I began to type in a search for “do patients remember their cardiac catheterizations?” This is what autopopulated:

A Google search showing that "do patients fart during surgery" is a popular query.
Who asked this?

Well, it turns out that patients can and do pass gas during surgery, and it can be dangerous. Witness the case of a woman whose tale of woe made it into Women’s Health. She was undergoing laser surgery on her cervix when she passed gas. The laser ignited the gas and caused a spark that lit the surgical drape on fire, and she got badly burned from the waist down.

Anyway, what I would like to know is who is Googling that? And why?

Until next time, friends and fiends.

A plastic model of a human heart with a haiku that says long white coat/we found something/life on hold
Image: Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Stick, Stick, Stuck

Well, I didn’t make the deadline for today’s Horrordailies. I had a coronary CT angiogram in the morning and the nitroglycerin left me with a raging headache.

The process itself went fairly smoothly. It’s one occasion being undead all of that Zen practice comes in handy. Your heart rate needs to be below 65 for them to do the test, so they take your vitals when you first get there and if it’s higher than that, they give you a beta blocker and make you wait an hour. However, I had already taken mine in the waiting room, and it hadn’t kicked in yet because my heart was racing a bit from yet another night of lousy sleep.

“Take a deep breath,” the nurse said after the first reading showed a ridiculously high-for-me 78. “That might help.”

“Wait, watch this,” I said. I shut my eyes, went completely blank, and a few seconds later she said “WOW! What did you do?”

“Ha, you saw it go down?”

Here eyes were wide. I had gotten it down to 60.

“Wait until I lie down for the test,” I said.

Then the fun started. It took three tries and two people to get the IV in. The first insert, in my one truly “good” vein in the crook of my left arm, grazed a nerve. Over the years I’ve been stuck so many times that sometimes I feel absolutely nothing, not even the pinch. This time, it stung like a mofo and I made all kinds of monkey noises, “Ooh! OOH! Ah-ah-ah-ah.”

So the nurse took it out and tried the center of my right arm. After a moment she let out a sigh.

“Infiltration. I see it bubbling up. Your veins are so small and deep.”

Yes, that happens with our kind. I much prefer to take the blood.

“Yeah, I know. I don’t suppose you can use a butterfly or pediatric needle?”

“Not with this. We push almost half a cup of fluid through it and it would really hurt.”

“And you can’t use the back of the hand or the wrist?”

“Nope. That would REALLY-really hurt.”

“That explains why it was so awful when I had this done a couple of years ago. They stuck it into the side of my wrist.”

She looked horrified. “Where? Not here.”

I named the radiology practice and she rolled her eyes.

“Yep. We don’t do that here,” she said. “Well, we could do this by ultrasound, but we’d have to reschedule it because I’m not trained for that. But let me see if one of the supervisors can help. We have one guy who has 20 years of this.”

A few moments later a silver-haired colleague of hers came in, tied a tourniquet around the middle of my left forearm and began tapping around. A third nurse took my right arm and did the same. It was like being in some kind of blood-letting salon.

Finally the guy said he had one last trick. He tied the tourniquet high up on my shoulder. I was so engrossed in talking about my job with the two women that I didn’t even feel the needle go in. He got it in just half a centimeter above the first stick, so now it looks like I was bitten by the world’s tiniest vampire in the crook of my arm. Or maybe a hamster.

We went into the room with the big CT scanner, and after a few rather funny moments when the leads kept falling off my chest and they had to use gel to stick them on, they rolled me into the scanner. The hardest part about CTs and MRIs is that they’re so like being in a coffin that it’s very easy for me to fall asleep, so I have to go blank again, which actually prevents me from sleeping. It’s what I call the Zen Zone. I didn’t even feel the contrast go in until the telltale warmth spread throughout my body and I actually felt human for a few moments.

At the end, as the nurse helped me sit up, she said “You were right about your heart rate. It was fifty! So we got a nice, good picture.”

I high-fived her and she sent me on my way.

Now I wait two business days for the result.

I was pretty tired when I got home, so I took a nap before logging into work. Unfortunately, I had to get into the Zen Zone again to calm myself down before I could crawl into bed because I VERY STUPIDLY decided to look at the news and Threads.

I’ll leave you with a clue as to who set me off:

An AI-generated image of a snake with fangs bared and the haiku "hiss and strike/every word he speaks/deception."
Image: AI-generated by Adobe Stock because all the real snakes on Unsplash were just too cute for this purpose.

Enough to Cause a Heart Attack

Nothing makes you realize how ganked up our health care system is like looking at a bill for something like a heart attack: $70,278.94. That was JUST the heart attack. If I added in the ER visits after that, it would be more than $80,000. Add in follow-up visits with doctors, EKGs, X-rays, bloodwork and other tests, medications, follow-up cardiac echo, and cardiac rehab, and it would easily top $100,000.

Now imagine if I didn’t have insurance.

But hey, ‘Murica needs more bombs and jets to drop ’em!

P.S. Care for the final five months of my mother’s life cost roughly $3 million–in 2000.