Another loud voice in the Internet wilderness

Since I haven’t really posted for a year, I figure I should catch you up/post some rambling shit for prosperity. So I’m sleeping one night last June (6-10-2014 if you want to play that number) and I woke up feeling very warm. As it was June I figured if I just opened the window, I’d be fine. I open the window, feel a little breeze aanndd I’m hot all over again. I decided a drink of water would settle me down, Nope. I tossed and turned for about ten minutes and realized I had never felt like this before – jittery, warm, lightheaded. So what do I do? WebMd of course!

I put in my symptoms and had a few options come up:

Heart Attack (Nooooo)

Stroke (I wiggled my fingers and said aloud “The Niigghhtt they drove old dixie down”) Nope. I had all my faculties that ain’t it..

High Blood Sugar – THAT’S IT!!!

I clicked on High Blood Sugar and a bar popped up across the screen telling me to seek medical attention. I thought about calling 911 but remembered that 3 days earlier i saw a woman fall and break her hip and it took them nearly a half hour to show up. So I got dressed and walked to the corner and caught a cab.

(Yeah right like he’d be driving around uptown at 2:30 am)

As we were traveling to NYP Allen Pavilion, I started to get a little short of breath and felt a pain in my upper left arm. HOLY SHIT SOMETHING’S WRONG. I’m gonna die in the backseat and Joselito up there is gonna dump me at a bus stop and roll me for money. We got to the hospital and I walked in. The guard asked if he could help me. I told him “I’m having a hard time breathing and my chest hurts.” When I said those last three words his eyes went wide and he called a nurse over . I repeated it to her and i was put in a wheelchair post haste and wheeled in to the ER.

Now the next 20 minutes or so is a blur. I was hooked up to oxygen, an IV, they wheeled in what I thought was a washing machine that turned out to be a x-ray machine, took an ekg, blah blah blah.

So a doctor walks up to me and looks up from his clipboard and says “You’re having a heart attack”

As I lay there shocked he asked me and I quote “How do you feel?”.

Remember in the original Terminator movie when Arnold is sitting in the flophouse and the janitor comes by to clean (!) the room and he goes through the responses?:

Mine went like this

• “Oh just delightful”
• “Like I just got my ass kicked by Mike Tyson”
• “Manolo, go get the yayo”
• “I’d like to see a wine list”
• “How do you think I feel? I’m scared shitless”

If you picked the last one you win.  He assured me I would be all right as they were sending me to another hospital to do a procedure that works with “96-97% of the people that go through it” Three of the arteries to my heart were blocked 50,60, and 70% respectively.  The doctor asked me if there was someone I needed to call. I don’t know if this is sad or not but I told him to call my boss as I obviously was not showing up that morning. The EMT’s put me on a gurney and the ceiling movie began. You know how you always see that scene of the ceiling as people are wheeled into the hospital? That went on for the next 10 minutes.

Next thing you know I’m in an ambulance traveling to Columbia Presbyterian and just like that I’m in an operating room. The doctoristhisclosetomyface telling me not to worry I’ll be all right. The nurse walks over with a bic razor and starts shaving my groin. First thing I thought was “That’s gonna itch when it grows back.” (“See? Now you know how it feels!” say most women I tell that part to.) Then they tell me they’re gonna give me some morphine as I have to be awake during the procedure. I’ll admit it I got excited. I thought I was gonna get all loopy and shit. No euphoria whatsoever. I felt everything they were doing. It was like having a tooth pulled. Albeit if the tooth was in the middle of your chest and you had a burning sensation as they were pulling it. It was discomfort. Unlike my second procedure (more on that later)

So what exactly did they do? They placed a stent in one of my arteries (the 75% blocked one of course). A stent is a small mesh tube that’s used to treat narrow or weak arteries.

As I’m not writing this from the grave, it went well obviously. Last month I told my new cardiologist that I was having some discomfort and burning/itching going on like when I had my procedure done last year. He gave me the option of continuing with medicine or going in again if need be. I opted for another procedure. Instead of going through the groin, they went in through my wrist. Now next to the operating table was a giant screen which showed the live angiogram of my chest and the shot of my artery as they were funneling the camera through.

OK The camera view didn’t really look like this But that’s how i like to think it did.

OK It looked more like this but in color.

Halfway through they gave me a “stress test”.  During stress testing, you exercise (walk or run on a treadmill or pedal a stationary bike) to make your heart work hard and beat fast. Tests are done on your heart while you exercise.(National Heart Lung and Blood institute)

Now since I was on the operating table, they opted to give me medicine to make my heart work harder like during exercise. This is called a pharmacological stress test. When they did this it felt like Andre the Giant was sitting on my chest and I was having a hard time trying to breathe. I started to panic and my doctor came over and calmed me down as the medicine would only last for a couple of minutes. The discomfort subsided and the rest went off without a hitch.

My diet which was pretty good post first operation, slacked off over time and I gained much of the weight I lost back. Now after this second procedure, I’m back on it. I’m determined not to go back through this again.