"THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD"
Since my escape from the Tower of Terror, aka Arcadia Methodist Hospital, the battle raging in and pertaining to my heart has not seen a dull moment. I have been on a medical roller coaster ride for the last three months and I am more than ready to get off.
After trying to get things back to normal since what I have been referring to as “The Incident” my cardiologist extraordinaire, Dr. Douglas Yun, had other ideas. Apparently in his exploration of my heart and arteries he found that there was much more blockage and it needed to be addressed.
And address it he did. By the end of August, I was back in the hospital to unblock the demon artery in question and add some reinforcement to the one that was opened up during “The Incident.” This time I was the guest of a different medical venue, Huntington Memorial in Pasadena. I have to say, my interaction with their staff was great, and the best of the three hospitals I have had to deal with in as many months.
Huntington was far more organized and caring than San Gabriel Valley Medical Center or Arcadia Methodist. Both of those, while claiming to be nonprofit organizations, seem to only be in it for the money, as Frank Zappa used to say.
The staff at Huntington, both surgical and nursing, seemed to genuinely care that (a) I was there and (b) that I was comfortable from the time I checked in until the second I checked out. No mention of money was ever discussed other than to confirm my insurance upon entry.
I have to say the stent surgery this time around was even more surreal even though it was done sans the morphine. There is just something completely bizarre about being completely awake for the entire procedure. Watching what Dr. Yun and his crack heart staff were doing inside my chest on the big video screens to my left was like some kind of weird out of body experience. For those of you who are keeping score, I now have four stents in my heart collection.
Since “The Incident” I have had time to reflect on the entire situation and what led me to it. To those of you who know me, you can immediately point to my smoking and diet as two of the culprits that got me there. But they weren’t alone.
You see, like many of you, I avoided going to the doctor and having checkups. I was eventually motivated to go see a doctor after experiencing pain in my legs about five years ago. While my doctor focused on everything but my legs, he didn’t detect the problem with my heart despite numerous EKG’s and prescribing me a ton of different medications that made me feel like crap. After three years of that nonsense, I stopped going. The pain in my legs was still there.
Then about a year ago I had some pain in my chest and it motivated me to make a return visit to the same doctor, not wanting to seek out a new one. Over the next few months I was again given numerous EKG’s, and because I continued to complain about my legs, I was given what I was told was a full ultrasound of my legs. This doctor said that all my tests had come back clear and he told that nothing showed up that was unusual.
Well, given that “The Incident” happened within a couple of months after these tests, you can guess that I am not going to that doctor anymore.
The decision to dispense with this doctor was reinforced when on a follow up appointment with Dr. Yun he asked me, just as an aside, if I was aware of the total blockage in the main artery of my right leg. Huh?
He also said that if there was that much blockage in the right one that there is a pretty good possibility that the left one had blockage as well. Oh great. He discovered this after a brief glance at a mini ultrasound done to check the incision for the first stent entry. Now that the heart issue is mostly under control we have begun addressing this issue. When will the fun ever stop?
The whole point of me chronicling this experience is to give you all a window into what was a mystery for me prior to the axe falling. I consider myself lucky to still be here. I have quite a few friends that aren’t here for the same reason. They either waited too long to go to the hospital or put too much faith in a bad doctor that they trusted.
If it doesn’t feel right, pull the trigger. Don’t think, like I did, that “I just had an EKG and my doctor said my heart is fine” especially if you are alone when it happens. Not everybody is lucky enough to have someone like Stacey, my wife, standing by to talk you into calling 911 or taking you to the hospital.
Sometimes you have to trust what you feel, not what you’re told.
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