My Heart Attack or Two

My 60th birthday is coming up in a few weeks so I thought I'd post a few of my Stories, while I can still remember (or make up) a reasonable portion of them. None of the following may be terribly true or accurate, but it's how I remember it. It's probably appropriate to start with my "Brush with Death".

Around Christmas 2002 I had a heart attack or two, or so they tell me. They weren't the "clutch your left arm, grit your teeth, and fall on the ground (and die, or not, depending on the needs of the script)" kind like you see in the movies, which is probably as fortunate as it is anticlimactic. But to start at the beginning...

For a couple of weeks before Christmas, whenever we'd walk the dogs, I'd get a dull ache in my left wrist. I'd be thinking, "Gee, I don't remember typing all that much today." In retrospect: duh!

Then when I went to bed on Christmas Eve, it felt like I'd wrenched my back. (Along with, you know, like, every other muscle I own. Despite having done nothing all day to wrench anything. *Willfully* stupid, or just *plain* stupid -- you decide.) I tossed and turned, vainly looking for a position that didn't hurt, and eventually managed to get to sleep.

Christmas Day at my mom's house in Downey. The presents are all opened, and most of the relatives have gone home. I mention to my mom that I've been having this pain in my left wrist, and she says "Go see a doctor". I'm like, "Oh, it's not that bad, and only once in a while", and she says, "Go see a doctor". My dad, whose family all dies from heart attacks, and himself a recent recipient of a quintuple bypass, wanders through, and my mom tells him that I'm having pain in my left wrist. He says, "Go see a doctor, it's your heart".

I say, "No, no, no -- it's just a little ache", leaving out the "that happens when I exercise, and creeps further up my arm the more I do, and goes away as I cool down" part, 'cuz I'm not exactly aware of that pattern yet.

My dad says, "I'll prove it to you", and goes and fetches one of his nitroglycerin pills. I put it under my tongue as instructed, in dissolves, and nothing happens, and I say so.

Side Note: Of *course* nothing happened -- there was nothing *to* happen. I realize now that my dad thought that I was having pain *at that moment*, and his "proof" was going to be that the pain went away when I took the nitro. He didn't know I wasn't having any pain to alleviate, and I didn't know what he meant by "proof". Communication Score: 0 out of 10.

So he says, "Oh, they lose potency when the bottle's open. I'll get you a new one". I take that one, and...

Science Note: Nitro stops heart attacks by somehow magically opening up the (clogged up) arteries around your heart, so all your blood can go there. Very clever -- unfortunately, there may not be enough blood left for your head.

... I immediately faint. I'm sitting on the couch, so I just keel over. I wake up moments later to see my dad hovering over me yelling my name, and my wife on the phone, lying to the paramedics about me having a heart attack. All I'm really having is a nitro-overdose-induced fainting spell, but potato, potahto.

Pretty quick the paramedics arrive and come tromping in in their big yellow pants. The guy asks me if I can sit up, and I'm feeling perfectly fine now that there's blood in my brain, so I say, "Sure!", and sit up and almost faint again, and lie back down, and revise my answer to, "No, I guess not". He says that if I can't get over to the stretcher, he has to take me in, and I figure it probably won't count if I crawl over there, so off we go. (By the way, I can definitively state that having a heart attack on Christmas is the *definition* of "Never live it down".)

On the way to the hospital, I imagine they installed the I.V.s with the blood thinners and beta blockers that I ended up with, but I don't like needles so whenever they bring any out I go to my Happy Place and refuse to notice. Is that a squirrel?

At the hospital, they apparently don't have any rooms for me, so I lie on a gurney in the hallway, and as the nitro wears off, I have another "wrenched back" episode. I tell each passing nurse, "Ouch" or words to that effect, and they each respond the way you do when a drunk junkie asks you for spare change from a dark alley -- pretend you didn't hear and walk faster.

They eventually get me into a room, and very eventually the cardiologist shows up (it is Christmas Day, after all), and suddenly it's old home week. The guy is my dad's actual cardiologist, and it's all "Hey, Don! How you doing? This your boy?" My dad sheepishly admits his felony distribution of prescription drugs, and the guy just slaps him on the back and says, "Hey, don't worry about it! I'd'a done the same thing!"

The rest of the hospital stay is a bit of a blur -- no doubt there were needles involved, and, like I say, once those come out, I'm decidedly Not There anymore. Apparently, they decided that they could run a camera up in me to take a look at the trouble, but couldn't be bothered to actually fix it while they were in there. Sure 'nuff, the pictures show that my hereditarily high cholesterol has caused my arteries to jam up like a grease-filled glass pipe in a Drano commercial.

But apparently they can't just throw some Drano into one of these fifty needles that are already installed in me -- they gotta do it old-school like Roto-Rooter and physically scrape the gunk away. And that takes, somehow, more people in the room than the camera work does, even though it's essentially the same procedure. And it's Christmas, so there aren't enough people around to do it. So they decide to (upside!) ambulance me down to my own hospital in Mission Viejo, where I can be closer to my people, and the equipment isn't left over from World War Two.

At Mission, they put me in a room in I.C.U., even though I was really just waiting around for some doctors to get home from their golfing trips in the Bahamas. Apparently they had rooms to spare, 'cuz, surprise!, most folks try to *avoid* the hospital at Christmas time.

I spent most of the time laying around, getting re-poked every half-hour or so (it seemed) by another nurse wanting more blood. I invariably told each of them that I don't like needles, but since needles are a Nurse's Best Friend, they just laughed it off, and didn't notice me not laughing along. Until one guy who said, "Oh, I'll use the tiny needle, then". What?!? There are "tiny needles"?!? And he went to work and I didn't feel a thing. Why is *this* a secret?!?

Apparently they can tell if you've had, and count, heart attacks by looking at your blood. There might be tea leaves, a carved bone rattle, and some possum teeth involved, too. They told me I had had two heart attacks. Really?!? When? I don't remember clutching my left arm, gritting my teeth, and falling down. But the possum teeth don't say "when", just if. I reckon they were that toss-and-turn night, and the late evening that I spent invisible on a gurney in the hallway.

I was visited in the hospital by a surprising number of friends and family, who apparently didn't expect me to leave there vertically, but who were civil enough not to mention any money I might owe them. And I spent a lot of time trying to sleep with a dozen stickers with wires attached glued to my chest. I finally decided to (Born to be Wild!) just lose the hospital gown that was making it even worse, having to thread the wires out the neck, and, as we all know, doesn't cover anything anyway.

At one point a pretty nurse came in and asked me if I wanted to, you know, freshen up a little. I thought, "Score! Sponge bath!", but she just tossed a packet of giant wet-naps on the bed and closed the curtains on her way out.

Finally, a cardiologist managed to trade in his golf gloves for some surgical ones and come by to see me. (He was Muslim, but who can blame him for taking advantage of someone else's holiday?) He walked in reading the chart, looked up, and halfway turned around to leave. Apparently, by the chart, he was expecting some 70-year-old fat guy, not a 48-year old skinny one.

He ended up doing the procedure, where they run a mini Doc Ock bendable robot arm up from a cut in the big artery under the fold where your tummy meets your leg, up to your heart, swab it out a little, and leave some expandable ballpoint pen springs in the tight parts to hold 'em open. I'd describe it more fully, but I'm getting woozy just thinking about it.

To make it just that much more fun, they can't put you to sleep for it so you don't have to watch, but they can give you a Valium so you get to watch but you don't care. And actually, given the Valium, it's kind of fun to watch the giant industrial robot arm with the X-ray cam at the end, wooshing around you every which way so the doc can tell what he's doing in there, and not, you know, tear a hole in an artery wall so they have to crack your chest open to fix it (which is, it turns out, why there are so many people around -- just in case).

Of course, you spend an hour or so waiting for everyone to show up and get their stuff, and, you know, the extra needles, ready. And you don't want to be thinking about what they're about to do to you, or all those needles. I spent that time running through the most complicated guitar song I know, "Scarborough Faire", in my head, envisioning the left and right hand patterns in 3D space like a guitar-centric version of the beginning of "Toccata and Fugue" in "Fantasia". The Valium may have helped with that...

Anyway, Spoiler Alert!, it all went fine and I survived to tell the tale. In Downey, they cut into my right leg to run the camera up to my heart. In Mission Viejo, they used the left leg. Afterwards, Mission Viejo put in a single dissolving stitch, and by the time I got home, you couldn't tell anything had happened there. On the other hand (or leg), Downey had put a big wad of gauze and, I'm not making this up, a giant plastic C-clamp around to my buns to hold it. Even six days later, it looked like I'd been hit by a truck. The blood thinners undoubtedly contributed to the bruising, but yeowch! (I have pictures, but you don't want to see them.)

Inexplicably, in the following few days while I was resting up from all the fun, I had an urge to document the experience in cartoon form, despite little or no previous experience (or skill) with drawing cartoons. I'll include those here.

It's been more than a decade since all of this, and I haven't had a twinge of trouble since, so, good job, Doc. And it's strangely comforting to know where your weakest link is. Whenever I do something stupid (like eat something that's fallen on the floor, or drink from a BPA-infested water bottle) and my wife says, "Don't do that", I say, "*This* ain't what's gonna kill me".