It turns out that I’ve been a heart attack waiting to happen. And indeed it did happen sometime earlier this year, probably in the middle of February, during that week when I was so wiped out that I spent almost all my time in bed. Not that I really noticed at the time.
All this gets confirmed Wednesday with an angiogram at Gates Vascular Institute, successor to Millard Fillmore Hospital on Gates Circle and now a slick, modern appendage to Buffalo General Hospital in Buffalo’s ever-expanding Medical Campus.
The personable angiogram doc, Dr. William Morris, no relation to the theatrical booking agency, delivers the verdict a couple hours after taking a look inside my heart via a catheter threaded up through an artery in my right arm.
One of my heart arteries is completely blocked, he says. That was the heart attack. Two others have major obstructions – one is 70%, the other has three restricted areas, two 70s and a 90. There's a fourth one, too, and it's OK. So I’ll be back at Gates on Friday, when Dr. Morris will use the same arm artery to install heart stents. Following that, an overnight hospital stay and four weeks of generic Plavix, which will thin out my platelets.
The upshot of all this – my bladder surgery is postponed until June, date to be determined. As Dr. Morris notes, the heart problems have to be taken care of first. Hopefully, the delay in the surgery won’t cause complications. I may be cancer-free for the moment, but the bladder won’t let me stay that way.
So there are several blessings to count. First of all, thanks to that accidental second-time-around EKG two weeks ago, I’m not going to suddenly clutch my chest and drop dead. Second, I’m not going to expire unexpectedly when Dr. Guru and his robots are digging out my bladder. Third, now that I have the month of May for yard work, I’ll get to plant flowers. (Downside – I’ll be in recovery mode during the run-up to the Garden Walk at the end of July.) Fourth, I’ll get to play bridge in the Rochester Regional Tournament in mid-May, the first Rochester regional in many a moon, which I was very much looking forward to until surgery started looming.
Minor blessings: They call the hospital rooms “suites” at Gates Vascular Institute and sweet they are, amenable as rooms in good hotels. Spending Friday night there will be a pleasure.
Dr. Morris did the procedure through my arm instead the artery in my groin, which is more common and which would hurt more right now. “Dr. Morris doesn’t go through the groin,” his associate physician said.
Time for the procedure was set back to mid-afternoon on Tuesday, then pushed ahead Wednesday when a big case suddenly came up. The nurses and aides had to rush to prep me. At one point, they felt like backstage assistants prepping the star between scenes – one was asking questions, another was inserting the IV, another was taking my blood pressure and still another was shaving my arm for the catheter.
I wasn’t knocked out for the angiogram, just dosed with something to make me feel relaxed, which is what Tuesday bridge partner Florence Boyd said would happen, having had one at Gates a little while ago. She also said you could watch the procedure on the doc’s video monitor, which I did. Not very revelatory to my untrained eye, but I caught glimpses of the wire-like probe and some dark squirts of dye.
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