After a short trip in the down elevator and several turns on some labyrinthine lower floor, we entered the Cardiac Catheter Lab. I wasn’t allowed to raise my head so my view of it was pretty much what the ceiling had to offer. Peripherally, I could see a control room behind big sheets of glass and a wall lined with shrink-wrapped packages of different lengths of tubes or cables. It looked like the do it yourself section of a sterile car parts store.
They don’t mess around in there; time is money, I guess. After “skootching” (must be a medical term) from the gurney to the table where the job was going to be done, my arm was tucked into an automatic blood pressure cuff that periodically squeezed my upper arm like it was trying to get juice out of it. Leads were hooked up to my chest. They gave me something to relax.
There are three ways to do this procedure: through the arm, the leg, or the groin. I already knew they were using the third option. The male scrub nurse told me he was going to cover my “middle” and start shaving. In my drugged and sleepless state it took a few seconds to realize what he meant by “middle.” Immediately to the left of the table was a bank of monitors and he was working to my right. I assumed the doctor would be working there, too, and that’s where the nurse started shaving. My dilemma of the moment was, do I let it stay lopsided and wait for it to grow back or finish the job when I got home. Then he did the other side too. Was he giving me a “Brazilian?”
That was the last I felt in that area as they injected something to numb it. Seconds later, the procedure began.
I mostly stared at the ceiling as the room went from bright to dark to dim to yellow and I don’t know how many other colors. A white box hovered over my chest, moving from left to right as they looked at my heart from different angles. Occasionally, they told me to turn my head left or right. Otherwise it was like I wasn’t there. They didn’t even warn me of the burst of intense heat injecting the dye would cause. It felt for a few seconds like the sun was inside my body.
The day before, the cardiologist told me that it could be something or it could be nothing. Up to this point there was nothing to indicate anything. Not much was said because this team appeared to have worked together a lot. I heard a few things I understood amid all the medical jargon. Then I heard, “Ho-lee shit ”
Holy shit? I don’t know a whole lot of doctor talk but I didn’t think “holy shit” was part of the lexicon.
“Jim,” the doctor said, “you have a 90% blockage in your proximal circumflex.”
Holy shit indeed. On further review it would later be upgraded to 95%. Hoooo-leeee shit There was a heretofore nameless, at least to me, blood vessel in my own body threatening to do me in.
Then they did an angioplasty using a balloon that they inflate to press the blockage into the arterial wall. When they did that I told the doc that I was feeling the jaw pain.
“Good,” he said, “that’s how we know we got it.”
They put in a stent to keep the artery open and that was that. I never felt the jaw pain again and never hope to, now that I know what it means.
And just that quickly it was over. At least the surgical part of it was. The scrub nurse put some gauze on the spot where they’d put in the dye and the stent and put all his force down on it to hold it for at least fifteen minutes. It’s basic first aid. Use pressure to stop the bleeding, just like they’d taught us in that first aid class. While he was doing that he showed me a replay of the procedure. The circumflex artery, as its name implies to those of us who suffered through four years of high school Latin, circles the heart. My blockage was half an inch long. It was fascinating to see how they opened the artery to let the dye, and the life-giving blood, go through freely.
Finally, the bleeding at the incision site stopped and it was time to leave. On the way out, one of the nurses said I was probably two days away from coming in by ambulance, “if I was lucky.” At that moment I considered myself very lucky.
In two days it was supposed to be my turn to move the trailer generator from our EMA station to the local farmers market. It provides electricity to keep the dairy products refrigerated. The trailer has to be manhandled from the wall where we park it and moved to the center of the garage so we can hook it up to our SUV. It’s easy to move but takes a little muscle to get it going. Who knows what would have happened had I tried it. There’s no one around at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning and I’d have been in serious trouble had something happened.
I’d hung ten on the brink of my mortality. By the grace of God I was able to step back. I had truly dodged a bullet.
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