Sorry for the manifesto on Sunday. I'm enduring a combination of things at the moment: a need to keep everyone up to date, a need to be creative, and a need to be a bit self-indulgent.

The last one is laughable given the fact that I am forced to ask my wife (who's currently 71 weeks pregnant) to do everything for me.

"Honey, I know your water just broke, but could you bring me a diet Fresca? Hmmmm? Hmmmm?"

Anyway, here's where we are so far.

Yesterday (Monday November 7th) was a good day. No. Scratch that. It was a great day.

We had an appointment with Dr. Douglas Murphy at St. Joseph's. This guy came as highly regarded as I've ever heard of and to be just fit in with an appointment was laughable.

I actually ran this line of dialog thru my head several times thanks to the movie "Malice" starring Alec Baldwin and Nicole Kidman:

"You asked me if I had a God complex. Lady, I AM God."

We arrived early to be safe and were taken back to a room within ten minutes of our appointment. That was not something I was expecting at all.

I got a brief exam from Ann, a very nice and friendly nurse who filled out my history and all of that stuff.

What's funny is we now call the last nine days my "medical history" because prior to October 27th, it consisted of a tonsillectomy in 1972 and my wisdom teeth out in 1985 with a bunch of allergy-related stuff mixed in for good measure.

It's also wierd to fill that out where it asks "Have you ever had a cardiac catheterization?" and I have to answer "Yes...last Friday."

Ann told us the Doctor would be with us shortly and again, we fully expected to wait. We also expected a booming voice, a big ego and a lot of waiting, and we got none of those things. What we got was a soft-spoken, very kind doctor who made a lot of eye contact and was interested in being clear, informative, and allaying as many fears and concerns as possible.

Here was a guy who is one of the most respected men in his field, and he was wearing an off-the-rack shirt. I mean, what galactic worm hole have I fallen into here?

He explained the robotic-assisted procedure and how it worked. He explained that his priorities were, in this order:

1) To successfully get my heart re-started.
2) That I survived the procedure (which is kind of the same as number one).
3) To successfully complete the bypass.
4) To use the robot to complete this procedure in a less-invasive manner.

He then explained what was going to happen.

They would put me out (thank God) and would make a small entry into my left groin which would be where they would connect me to the heart-lung machine that would keep me alive while they stopped my heart to work on it.

(Two points here: My groin hasn't gotten this much attention from strangers since...well, never. Secondly, you hear a lot about bypass surgery like "Oh, Jerry's having a bypass done" or "Bob has to have a bypass" and it's become so common that you forget that it's not the bypass that's a big deal. The fact that they stop the human heart...YOUR human heart, do what they need to do and then fire it back up, is truly astonishing. At least it is when the guy is pointing to your chest).

Anyway, after I was hooked up to the heart-lung machine, they would make three or four small finger-sized incisions in my left chest as pictured here:


Of course, mine will be on my left breast and let's be honest, my left breastal region is a LOT hotter than THIS dude's. Anywho....

After that, the robot things will be inserted into my chest. The vein that will be harvested from my left mammary area will be removed, laid out and cleaned while the bypass site will be prepared.

Then, the bypass will be performed, the instruments removed, the heart restarted and finally I will be removed from the heart-lung machine a vastly superior being than I was just hours before, if that's even possible.

(Oh, somewhere along the way I will be put on a ventilator and have one of THOSE catheters inserted. I've heard that either of those aren't much fun but, at this point, I've become far more of a big picture guy than I was before).

I will then be returned to the Intensive Care Unit where I will spend the night (I think). After being awakened I will be moved to a regular room and will spend much of the following two days complaining, which means that I will be (hopefully) perfectly normal.

Depending upon how things go, I should be sent home either Saturday or Sunday. Unfortunately, a Sunday hospital discharge means that I will be watching the Auburn-Georgia game from a hospital bed. I welcome as many of you as the hospital will allow to come watch it with me. Seriously. I can't watch that game alone. How sad would THAT be?

Now let's backtrack to today. Dr. Murphy told me that he would arrange for me to get all the pre-op scans done (including a heart CT and X-rays) along with meeting the anesthesiologists and some other miscellaneous stuff.

If you want to know if this guy's the shizzle over there, consider the fact that I had never heard of him prior to Friday, he had never met me prior to yesterday, and he just "arranged" for them to "fit me in" for six hours of lab and office work amidst the patients with actual appointments.

Then, it's home for a leisurely Wednesday and a 4:30am wakeup the following day that would see me arriving at St. Joseph's by 5:30am Thursday to get the ball rolling and all of this stuff taken care of in short order.

You may notice that in previous posts I mentioned that I was a huge needlepuss and that I hated shots, yet I didn't even mention that today I'll be injected with dye, have multiple blood draws done and other stuff like that there.

It's because I stopped caring about shots and needles. No, I don't like them. No, I probably never will. But it's such a nothing thing to think about amidst all of this other stuff.

Also, the fact that I am so lucky to have had this blockage detected by something other than a call to 911 following a possibly fatal heart attack makes it seem trivial and very shallow to bitch about some minor discomforts along the way to repairing my heart, saving my life, and giving me what will effectively be a do-over at age 37.

Also, just a note to my friends, family, neighbors, co-workers and folks I've never met in person but simply "know" from teh internets:

Your prayers, good thoughts, well wishes and efforts at sending good Karma my way are all greatly appreciated. I have been surprisingly at peace since yesterday morning (and even before that) for a reason that I can't quite explain. Being a high-strung fella, it doesn't feel normal but for some reason, that's how it is.

One more thing I wanted to throw in here that didn't really fit anywhere else. The day I first went to the doctor about this "little" chest pain was last Monday. While there they did a resting EKG (which turned out to be normal) and did a blood draw to get my cholesterol. We finally got those results yesterday.

(Sidenote here: I've never EVER seen a physician look like he saw a ghost like Dr. Henderson did yesterday when he saw me. He just kept shaking his head and saying "I saw your DIMPS scan results and I just can't believe it. There was really no reason to send you for that stress test beyond a very minor chest pain, and even with these cholesterol results, there was STILL nothing to indicate a problem. I'm completely shocked.")

Now, consider that this wasn't a fasting cholesterol draw. In fact, I had eaten Zaxby's about two hours before this which would explain my tri-glyceride results.

Anyway, guess what my cholesterol was?

It was 144.

And with the exception of the triglycerides (which were about 326 or so) everything else was normal. In fact, at the bottom of the cholesterol panel there is a ratio that should be between zero and 4.5 and if you are outside of that, that displays a risk of heart attack.

Mine was 2.4

I also mention this because the first cardiologist I saw last Thursday asked me my cholesterol count and I said "I don't know, but it's around 140."

He replied "No way. I expect we'll find that you're cholesterol is very high."

I then said "I'll bet you my house and everything in it against yours that it's under 160."

He said "No way. You're on."

So Dr. S...I'd like my new house please.


And thanks Dr. Henderson. You saved my life.