This was snipped without permission from an email I received this week. Almost the same day our friend Pam found out that her biopsy was clean after a "bad" breast x-ray. It seems we hear a lot of bad news from friends and relatives. There is good news too. Today let us celebrate the good news!
"Well, I'm back home, none the worse for wear except for a healing hole in my femoral artery. Brenda got me checked in this morning at the unholy hour of 6:00 a.m. and all the little staffers poked me and briefed me on the impending journey into geezerhood. The head nurse for the cardiac unit, Shane, pulled me aside in the hall on the way down to the table and put it all into language I could understand. Then he pointed out the rack and told me to hop aboard. On the second try I said to hell with modesty, let my bare ass hang out, and climbed aboard without problem. Its funny how dressing all those young lovelies in baggy scrub suits de-sexualizes a room.
Shane administered a drug cocktail that would put the best street pushers to shame and I coasted into the procedure conscious, but not giving a damn. I recall minimal conversation, very little of which was directed at me, and a poking sensation in my groin area. Suddenly, the Doc snaps off his gloves and says we're all done. Remarkable, an hour and a half procedure apparently took only 25 minutes.
Shane approaches my head, grins, and says I'm fine. No blockage anywhere, nothing to push or scaffold out of the way, I can go home. Then a nurse comes over, slaps both of her hands on the hole in my groin and pushes for 10 minutes. I inquired why she didn't have some stainless steel surgical devise to do this for her and she tells me that such a device exists, but the old armstrong method is still the best way to do it. (Deep down I knew that she couldn't have been interested in my groin for 10 consecutive minutes.)
I was put in a side room for the next 4 hours and told that I had to remain flat on my back and not move my right leg; the implication being that if I did it would be on pain of death. Shane's cocktail was still working, so I got about 2 hours of sleep logged before I got bored and fidgety.
So, there's nothing wrong with my pump or plumbing. As the resident that stole my chart to read said when he returned it, "You've got a really boring health history." Brenda showed me a sampling of the photos they took of the arteries around my heart and explained what the Doc told her after I woke up. He was prepared to implant stints, but couldn't find any place that needed them. I'm sound and can head for the Colorado high country.
After puzzling on this for another half hour it dawns on me that either this Doc has made a big mistake, which is doubtful since he's got photographs and Shane was watching him; or the dipshit that read the readout from my stress test and interpreted a spot of starved heart muscle was dead wrong in his interpretation and report. I'm going with the latter guess. Next month I get to go see my friendly GP that started this carnival and I plan to be sarcastic. Unfortunately he'll just grin and tell me I should be glad we have all this baseline data to mark my eventual decline against.
Worst of all, I'll spend the next few years having to listen to Brenda tell me and everyone in ear-shot, "I knew there wasn't anything wrong with you. Now you can go back to sitting in front of the TV."
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