Corrections or additions?
This article by Richard K. Rein was prepared for the June 12, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
A Cardiac Patient’s Story
What am I doing here?
It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, January 8, 2002, when I would
normally be strapped to my workstation, a slightly frantic, 54-year-old
editor putting the finishing touches on a newspaper that absolutely
positively has to go the printer at 1 p.m.
Instead I am strapped to a long slab in a cold room at the Mercer
campus of Capital Health System in Trenton, watching passively as
a cardiologist, Dr. Sunder Venkatesulu of the Mercer Bucks Cardiology
Group, and two technicians prepare to insert a catheter into an artery
in my groin and snake it up into my heart. Overhead a bank of fluorescent
screens and video monitors loom ominously.
As the cardiologist punctures a tiny hole through the skin — numbed
with lidocaine — and into the artery and installs a six-inch long
sheath into the artery to guide the catheter as it begins its intravenous
journey, the technicians review my chart: "Blood pressure 110
over 70, total cholesterol under 150," they observe, citing the
figures that suggest I am not an obvious risk for heart disease. "What
are you doing here anyway?" they ask, in a tone that suggests
this might be another one of those big false alarms.
As the cardiologist prepares to inject an iodine dye through the catheter
into the heart, I explain that I have had some vague feelings of chest
discomfort. Moreover there was an area of uncertainty on a thallium
stress test I had two months earlier. At that point the cardiologist
injects the dye. The squirt goes in, the images emerge on the screens
overhead.
"There it is," says Venkatesulu matter of factly. He points
to what I later learn is the left anterior descending artery —
the LAD or, as some wags have described it, "the widow-maker."
Leading out of the heart the artery on the screen looks like a fountain
pen. Then it abruptly turns into a piece of fishing line. In typesetting
terms it’s as if an eight-point rule suddenly turns into a one-point
rule:
— — — ________ ______
"It’s 90 percent blocked," says the cardiologist. "That’s
why he’s here."
As my thoughts plunge into a black hole of despair, the team in the
catheter lab turns salubrious. "Congratulations," they say.
"We’re sending you over to St. Mary for an angioplasty and a stent."
Someone suggests it will be a slam dunk. I have watched too many sports
contests to be assured by that analogy, and I keep free falling into
the black hole. But eventually I realize what they are saying: Good
for me to be where I am. In the alternative, I imagine, I would be
back at the desk, blissfully ignorant, strapped to that work station
until the magic moment occurs when some glob of fat in the blood —
a glob no bigger than one of those bacon bits from the Caesar salad
or a fleck of butter from that bagel — flowed up to that artery
and wedged into that last little open channel. It would be a capstone
to my career. Capstone, rhymes with tombstone.
While coronary heart disease is the number one killer
in America, exceeding the fatality rates of cancer and AIDS together,
for example, it has never been the disease lurking in the back of
my mind. For as long as anyone as ever measured it, I have had low
cholesterol and normal blood pressure. My weight crept up from my
high school level of about 155 pounds to as high as 165 pounds. But
that was over a 30-year period and I’m 5-foot-10 — hardly fat.
My father and my three uncles all have had coronary heart disease
of some sort, but not until they were in their 70s. When doctors ask
about family history of heart disease they are referring to the early
onset of the disease. My father is living happily at the age of 83
with a quadruple bypass, performed at the age of 80. Of the four brothers
the two who also smoked are dead. That was another positive note in
my CHD dossier: I have never smoked.
Still, CHD is a big killer, and the doctors I have had since the age
of 40 have all raised the specter of it during my physical exams.
When I was about 45, a young internist named Mark Schaeffer with the
Princeton Rheumatology Group suggested that I start walking 20 to
30 minutes a day, four or five times a week.
I remember asking Schaeffer what good that would do. Would the mere
act of blood passing more rapidly through the arteries keep blockages
from occurring? If so, I was thinking, how could a guy like Jim Fixx,
the first guru of jogging and author of the best-selling book, die
of a heart attack?
Schaeffer’s response was intriguing: Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t,
he answered. But the physical activity might reveal a problem sooner
rather than later. In the alternative, I remember him saying, you
could just be sitting at your desk, and discover it all at once, when
it would be too late.
That made a lot of sense, and I thought about walking. But let’s remember:
Combined cholesterol total well under 200, blood pressure normal,
not overweight, never a smoker, and no family history of "early"
heart trouble. So I never did go walking. Not even once.
A few years later Prudential, the medical insurance carrier we had
at the time, had skyjacked its rates for small businesses through
the roof. So our company went with good old "Blue," Blue Cross-Blue
Shield, and I caught a doctor named Harold Gever. At that time he
practiced out of the Blue Cross clinic on Quakerbridge Road —
that’s right a clinic, with all the trappings that one might associate
with socialized medicine. But, like Schaeffer, Gever also seemed to
listen to what you had to say and he even seemed to encourage you
to talk about your health.
These are not traits that come automatically with your MD degree.
As I was getting comfortable with Gever, through various minor ailments
and more or less annual physicals, my father was going through his
quadruple bypass. That procedure propelled him through dozens of appointments
with various medical practitioners. After a while, my father began
a little time and motion study. Instead of keeping track of how long
he waited for each appointment (that was plenty long, as you can imagine),
he began tracking the amount of time each doctor spent with him during
the appointment. Would you guess five minutes? My father’s informal
survey revealed an average patient-doctor interchange of about 90
seconds.
Gever might have given him 5 or even 10 minutes. The son of a pharmacist
in Philadelphia, Gever got interested in medicine as a child. In 1971
he was admitted to Brown in a pre-med program and after seven years
later took a residency at Temple, "where residents ran the show."
One of his first jobs was with a public health program. Seeing all
kinds of people with all kinds of diseases, he learned the value of
listening. "To me one of the pleasures of the profession is meeting
and talking with people, and it’s served me well in a diagnostic role,"
he says. But, he adds, in the managed care environment, "it’s
not in the interest of the physician to probe a lot. It’s my background
to cover as many bases as we can, but unfortunately that’s not as
common today."
In the spring of 2001 I first began noticing some discomfort in my
chest: Not all the time, and not for very long. Later — much later
— I would discover that my feelings were virtually identical to
the symptoms of heartburn. Sometimes the discomfort visited me shortly
after I jumped into the car and headed off for home or the office.
Often I experienced it at moments of emotional turmoil or anger. There
were plenty of those moments. Putting out a newspaper once a week
brings a little stress with it. Being a manager of people (that’s
an oxymoron) is another stressor. And at this same time I was enduring
the legal necessities needed to terminate my ill-fated marriage.
During one of those proceedings, my adversary’s attorney asked me
if I were in good health, asking the question in such a way that the
expected answer would be yes. I was under oath at the time, and I
surprised myself by my answer:
"I’m not sure that I am."
The attorney of course moved on immediately to other subjects. But
afterward I began asking myself what I meant by that answer. That
chest discomfort, I decided, must be with me more than I realized.
A few days later I called Gever’s office to schedule an annual physical.
It was June, 2001, but the first opening they had was not until September.
I debated playing the chest discomfort card to see if I could get
in earlier, but decided it wasn’t that serious.
Come September I am at Gever’s office, now a private practice on Mercerville-Whitehorse
Road but still honoring Blue Cross Blue Shield. All the blood work
seemed normal, but Gever — true to form — is willing to listen.
I talk about the chest discomfort, framing it — as many patients
must do — in an apologetic, I’m-sorry-if-I’m-overreacting tone.
Gever doesn’t see it that way.
"Here we take any report of chest pain very seriously," he
says. The doctor explains that I am at the age where a precautionary
stress test is probably a good idea. And the only kind of stress test
worth doing, he says, is a thallium stress test, "the gold standard,"
which involves a trip to the hospital, the injection of radioactive
dye into the bloodstream, and X-rays taken before and after a cardiologist-supervised
session on a tread mill. It would take a full morning at the hospital
and the insurance company allows about $5,000 for it. Gever’s office
puts the paper work into motion immediately.
That was Monday, September 10, 2001. If the appointment had been one
day later I probably never would have mentioned the chest discomfort
(if you wanted to hear about discomfort, I would have said, talk to
the families of the World Trade Center victims). And I certainly would
have put off the thallium stress test.
The stress is scheduled for October 24 at Mercer in Trenton. It’s
a hurry up and wait procedure — hurry to get there on time, get
some radioactive fluid injected into your arteries, wait for an set
of chest X-rays that are taken in something almost as enclosed as
a CAT-Scan machine, and then wait for a brisk walk on a treadmill
under the supervision of a cardiologist. After the exertion, you get
a second round of X-rays, all enhanced by that radioactive dye. If
your numbers on the treadmill are suspect, you can bet that the cardiologist
is going to study the X-rays that much more intently.
I am not expecting great results on the treadmill. I used to walk
a lot in my life, and I always enjoyed walking briskly, but the days
of walking from the Time-Life Building down to Penn Station —
a pretty good cardiovascular workout — were long gone. By the
fall of 2001 my big walks are from parking lot to the liquor store,
and I am not even making that pilgrimage as often as I had in my youth.
The cardiologist who picks up my case that day is Dr. Abraham George,
director of the medical staff at Capital Health Center who also maintains
a private cardiology practice just across the parking lot from the
Mercer center.
"Have you ever been on treadmill before?" he asks me before
we begin the trek.
"No," I reply.
"Well, don’t be nervous," he said. "It’s just like the
one at the gym."
"No, doctor," I explain. "When I say I’ve never been on
a treadmill, I mean never, not anywhere."
George is unfazed and conducts the rest of the test as if I were old
pro on the treadmill. When it’s all over he tells me he will review
the X-rays and get back to me with the results.
A week passes, then another. I began to figure that this one, like
most every other medical test I have ever taken, will prove to be
negative — another false alarm. What was I ever doing, worrying
about a little chest discomfort? I will be truly sorry now for wasting
the time of Gever and George and all the technicians and nurses who
were involved.
On election day, Tuesday, November 6, I have an appointment with Rose
Palma, the manager of the HQ shared office center at Forrestal Village.
Palma, I realize, is a name I have seen in press releases from the
American Heart Association. Michael Palma died of heart failure in
April, 2000, at the age of 41, while working out at a gym. His widow,
Mary Palma, has become a spokesperson for the American Heart Association’s
campaign to equip gyms and fitness centers with automatic defibrillators
that might make the difference between life and death to someone with
serious heart disease. I make a mental note to ask Rose if she is
related.
As I close out one issue of U.S. 1 and am racing toward the door to
meet Palma at Forrestal Village, I pause to take a phone call. It’s
Dr. Gever’s office. "Mr. Rein. Your stress test has come back
positive. You need to see the cardiologist. We have a referral for
you to pick up."
Positive? I literally have to remind myself that positive is negative
in this case. I head off to my appointment, and I still ask Palma
if there is a connection. Yes, Michael Palma is her brother. But I
am less enthusiastic about hearing all the details. Where is all this
leading?
Within a few days I meet with Dr. George, the cardiologist. George
is from the state of Kerala in India. His father was an engineer but
his extended family includes several medical doctors. "I just
fit into the mold," he says of his decision to become a doctor.
"And I had reasonable good grades." He studied at Vellore,
the medical school in India, and then came to the United States in
1976, finishing his cardiology training at the University of Louisville,
Kentucky.
Gever likes George. "He’s a conservative guy and he knows his
stuff," the internist says. And he does not rush to judgment.
"He’s probably a pretty good poker player," Gever adds.
At our follow-up appointment George says he’s not hiding any cards,
he just can’t be sure of what they are. The X-rays from the stress
test, he explains, shows a "shadow of doubt" in terms of blood
flow. Unfortunately the shadow falls in the one area of the heart
where false positives often occur. He too is aware of the low cholesterol,
the normal blood pressure, and the lack of family history at an early
age.
But we should take no chances, George says. The only way now to get
a definitive answer is with an angiogram, the procedure that will
send the catheter through the artery and into the heart.
I interject what little I know about coronary heart disease. Wouldn’t
it be possible to treat something like this with medication or exercise
or diet, I wonder aloud. "It would be pointless to speculate,"
George responds. "We need better information and that’s what we
will get with the angiogram."
Thinking back to the length of time it took to get an annual physical
scheduled, I begin to think that the angiogram might take place in
late winter or spring. The scheduler at the cardiology practice gets
me on the phone. They can take me in three days. Three days? I explain
why that’s no good. So let’s do it early next week, they suggest.
Next week is also impossible. In fact, the entire month of December
is no good, because of the demands of the annual U.S. 1 Calendar,
which I still desktop publish single-handedly and other year-end duties
that make this a very trying time of year for me.
How about early in January, I ask. Okay, is the response, but only
if your cardiologist approves. George agrees, but only if I do not
experience any further symptoms.
So we pick Tuesday, January 8. That gives me all day Monday to wrap
up most of the details for the January 9 issue. I finish up in the
office that night at around 11 p.m. I’m asleep shortly after midnight,
awake at 5:30, and riding down to Trenton at 6 a.m. thanks to my next-door
neighbor. I take nothing with me other than my insurance ID card —
I am expecting to have someone from the office pick me up at 2 p.m.
or so. Still, this is a lot of work for a little bit of chest discomfort.
What am I doing here, anyway?
In the days before the angiogram I had received all sorts of anecdotal
information and well intentioned recommendations from friends and
acquaintances. Some nurses at a New Year’s Eve party cheerfully told
me that I might not even need the procedure and that I should get
another opinion — people die during angiograms.
Another said that the most painful part of the procedure was the five
or six hours of pressure that had to be applied to the groin to staunch
the bleeding of that femoral artery. But, I was told, doctors had
an alternative to the pressure treatment — it was a plug that
could be installed and allow you to be immobile immediately. But you
had to insist on it, these knowing nurses told me, doctors make more
money prescribing the pressure treatment.
And another friend, himself a veteran of a heart bypass operation,
counseled that I have someone with me at the hospital. "You may
not be thinking clearly and you will need someone to help weigh all
the options."
That friend turns out to be half right. I am not thinking clearly.
In fact, as the cath lab crowd offers their congratulations on my
relatively early discovery of a problem, I am falling into that black
hole of despair. I no longer have a hint of coronary heart disease,
I have coronary heart disease. I am being transferred to St. Mary
for the "slam dunk," but in the meantime I will wait in the
intensive cardiac care unit at Mercer.
Intensive care. The cath lab people explain that that is strictly
a procedural technicality — because they are hoping to do the
angioplasty and stent installation later that same day at St. Mary,
they will leave the sheath inside the groin so that I will not have
to go through the long process of healing one puncture hole and then
starting another. But anyone with an open wound in a major artery
has to stay in intensive care.
To me it is all the same: After 17 years of working my heart out at
this newspaper what I have to show for it now is heart disease. And
in recent years, thanks to those divorce proceedings, my business
has been picked over by the lawyers and accountants as if it were
a Hallmark card shop — it has so much cash flow, it can be projected
to have such and such return over the next eight years, all you have
to do is plug in the numbers and clip the coupons. But I know that
in comparison to a card shop or lots of other less artistic endeavors,
a newspaper — especially this one — is driven by the heart
and soul of its founding editor and publisher. And at this moment
the heart is lying damaged in an intensive care unit in Trenton.
Despair is not an uncommon visitor to the cardiac care wards. When
my father came up for air after his quadruple bypass, he said enough
was enough — and promptly began pulling wires from his body in
preparation for an escape. He was restrained, of course, and now those
dark days are a distant memory.
Arnold Ropeik, the longtime columnist for the Trenton Times, wrote
a column on May 24, reflecting on his recent bypass operation: "The
second day into recovery, my mind, weathered slightly by 80-some years
and having fought off the enemies of anxiety before, let me down slightly
and I could see all kinds of patterns and figures and lines and flashes
and dashes and mishes and mashees and snakes and dark roads and sinister
faces. I felt people were hovering over me to do me ill. I had my
own list of terrorists to deal with."
Even after getting home, Ropeik reported, "I don’t feel a part
of the scene yet. . . I am so very tired now. . . This is wintertime,
lifewise, anyway. This is my life."
My life is passing before me in the cardiac intensive care ward. I
cannot answer a simple question without choking up. A nurse named
Elena visits with me and literally just holds my hand. Two of her
children are boys about the same ages as mine — talk about our
boys is about all I can manage.
So much for thinking clearly. But as for options, there are none presented,
and I am in no mood to discuss them if there were. The only course
of action is to go immediately to the medical center in Middletown,
just outside Newtown. St. Mary has not one but two open heart surgery
suites — and the doctors won’t do an angioplasty unless a surgery
suite is open, just in case.
Twice the ambulance ride to St. Mary is postponed. Elsewhere in the
intensive care unit another patient is having a heart attack. Alarms
sound. From my prone position I catch glimpses of nurses and doctors
scrambling in response. That patient gets moved ahead of me and into
the ambulance. Finally, after about six hours of lying flat on my
back I am carted off to Pennsylvania.
I am reminded that whatever else happens, I should not attempt to
sit up or move my leg. That six-inch sheath is still nestled in my
right femoral artery — a potential lethal weapon if it gets moved
out of place. In the ambulance I’m strapped in tight on the stretcher.
After 20 minutes or so we are parked at St. Mary, and I am moved to
the asphalt. As the crew closes the doors on the ambulance, the unattended
stretcher begins rolling down a slight grade. I look to my right and
see a car heading toward my path. "That’s it," my depressed
brain announces matter-of-factly. "I’ve got coronary heart disease
but it doesn’t matter because I’m going to die right here — hit
by an f-ing car."
At that point one of the crew reaches out and casually grabs the rolling
stretcher.
St. Mary turns out to be just what the doctor ordered, even though
the promise of a same day angioplasty falls through. Finally settled
into a room (still unable to move from my flat-on-my-back position),
I am told that this has been a very busy day in the cardiac unit.
At the moment not one but two catheterizations apparently have gone
awry — both patients are now undergoing open heart surgery. Since
I am at rock bottom emotionally, this news does not bother me. After
all, I had just looked death in the eye in the parking lot.
At around 6 p.m. the doctor who will do the angioplasty and stent
installation shows up in the room. Dr. David Drucker is young (37,
I later find out) and enthusiastic and straightforward. He explains
the reason for the delay — the two simultaneous catheterization
emergencies that have tied up both open heart surgery suites. While
my procedure doesn’t have any chance of reaching that level (I recall
the "slam dunk" analogy from the morning), Drucker explains
that he just won’t do it without an operating room available. "It’s
the safety net," he explains. "But you are first on the list
for the morning."
At that point I expect Drucker to bolt out to see another patient,
but he surprises me by hanging around and talking more about the big
picture of CHD. While my procedure may be a slam dunk, he says, in
effect, I should nevertheless now realize that I am at high risk for
another arterial blockage, possibly leading to a heart attack or stroke.
The good news is that some of the factors contributing to the disease
are matters of choice: Smoking, consuming the all-American diet, and
enduring the stress of modern life.
I am impressed by Drucker’s bedside manner — a combination of
youthful enthusiasm and cautionary wisdom. Later I discover that Drucker
determined that he would go into medicine when he was just 13 years
old and experiencing the medical system as it treated his father during
a prolonged battle with terminal cancer. "I was an angry 13-year-old,"
he says, unfavorably impressed with the communication skills of some
of the physicians on his father’s case. "My feeling was that I
could do things better."
Drucker’s path took him from Duke to Washington University in St.
Louis for medical school to a residency in cardiology at Yale to the
University of Chicago. He is now considered a cardiovascular specialist.
"I use catheters to fix everything," he says, "coronary
arteries to arteries in the neck, the legs, and the kidneys."
He has been doing catheterizations for the last five years, and does
anywhere from 500 to 1,000 in a year. When he finds out I am an editor,
he lights up. "I worked your counterpart at the Trenton Times,
Arnie Ropeik." Sure enough, a column by Ropeik describing some
stent work performed by Drucker is on the bulletin board in the hospital
hallway.
I am now looking forward to a new day.
Just like the morning before in Trenton, the sheath
and catheter are somehow inserted into my groin without so much as
a pin-prick of pain. I expect this procedure to be a little more complicated
than the day before and I am looking at the monitors above to see
if I can observe the procedure, if I can see what happens when that
catheter roots into that blockage. After 10 minutes or so I haven’t
seen a thing, and I think about asking Drucker where we stand. That’s
when he announces cheerfully that we are finished. Finished!
Later I get a copy of his report:
stress test. Cardiac catheterization done at an outside hospital revealed
a critical LAD lesion. He is now referred for angioplasty.
"After informed consent was obtained, the patient was brought
to the cardiac catheterization laboratory and a A#7 French short sheath
was placed into the right femoral artery. ReoPro therapy, as well
as heparin therapy, was given, and a #7 French JL4 guiding catheter
from Cordis was used to engage the left main coronary ostium.
"Diagnostic catheter revealed a 99 percent mid-LAD lesion, and
angioplasty was performed. The lesion was crossed with a BMW wire
hydrocoated wire, and a 3.5 x 18 Penta stent was inflated to 10 atmospheres.
The final results showed the LAD lesion to go from 99-0 percent. There
were no complications. The sheaths were removed at the end of the
case."
as long to write as it did to actually do the procedure. Removing
that sheath, however, is another matter. Two or more nurses participate
in the procedure, which involves removing the six-inch plastic guide
and then immediately clamping down on the hole in the artery so that
it gradually knits itself back together. Until recently they loaded
sandbags on your groin for four or five hours. Now at St. Mary they
used a plastic collar that goes around your waist, with a clamp that
presses a device the size of a baseball onto the exact point of entry.
Now you feel a little pain.
The nurses turn up the screws on you, so to speak, and check your
foot to make sure that a little blood is getting through. For the
next four or five hours you lie very still and are watched very carefully.
Finally the collar is removed, but you are still not allowed to move.
After another hour or so you can move the left leg. After another
hour you can move the right one. Finally you can get up. While I am
lying flat I do some calculations: My first sheath went in at around
8 a.m. Tuesday. It was pulled at 7 p.m. The pulling process was complete
at around 4 a.m. I received my second sheath at around 7 a.m. Wednesday.
By the time I am able to get up and walk around it is 8 p.m. That’s
36 hours, 33 of which have been lying flat on my back.
It’s not pretty, but it’s educational. I watch and listen as other
heart patients are admitted. In the interview the first question is
not about diet or stress or cholesterol. It’s always about smoking.
One man, returning to the bed next to me after a successful angioplasty,
tells the woman taking his history that, yes, he does smoke, but only
one in the morning with his coffee, another after he mows the lawn
or works outside, and perhaps one or two more after dinner.
She interrupts this elaborate answer. "It really doesn’t matter
how many or how few you smoke," she tells him. "Because starting
now we don’t want you to smoke any. Not even one."
When my checkout time finally arrives late on Thursday morning, the
discharge instructions are to go on a low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-sodium
diet; to begin an exercise program — walking is the one that is
mentioned; and take a combination of drugs and get my blood tested
for two things I had never heard of until then: lipoprotein (a) and
homocystein.
Top Of Page
The Diet
Just being overweight puts you at risk for heart disease,
but no one had ever accused me of being overweight. Still, over the
years my weight had gradually moved upward and most of that weight
seemed to be in the form of a beer belly, which also turns out to
be an indicator for possible heart trouble.
I had already cut back on my beer consumption. Several years ago I
stopped stocking the beverage in the office refrigerator, a substantial
change given that I have been known to spend 16 or 17 hours a day
there, several days in a row. Then, on September 10, 2001, Dr. Geever
and I discussed my lifestyle and he recommended cutting back even
more. Good idea, I thought to myself, I will make it my New Year’s
resolution this year. For sure. The next day, one of the most painful
18-hour days in my life, I got home around midnight to watch a replay
of the Twin Towers disintegrating. I immediately decided to stop drinking
my favorite beverage at home, as well — a small tribute to the
thousands lost that day, including the husband of U.S. 1’s Brenda
Fallon.
It turned out to be no great sacrifice. So now after a long day at
work, I would come home and unwind with a liter of club soda. I still
would have a drink or two when I was out socially, but that would
happen once every couple of weeks, certainly not once a day with my
schedule. I sat back and waited for the pounds to evaporate. Needless
to say they never did. After years of privately scoffing at people
who were trying to lose weight but claimed it was difficult, I changed
my mind.
Now this medically prescribed diet, I think, will be no more difficult
than cutting back on beer. I am already eating mostly pasta and chicken
rather than red meat and buttered potatoes. My boys and I actually
eat broccoli (steamed, with no butter) and carrots (raw). I drink
my coffee black and for the past decade, at least, I eat toast with
no butter. I hardly consume any milk at all and I usually skip dessert.
For as long as I can remember I have never added any salt to anything.
Still I go to one of those diet websites and check out the inverted
food pyramid — the one that tells you to chow down on carbohydrates
at every opportunity. I’m surprised to find dairy products near the
foundation of the pyramid. What’s more, the recommendation is that
people in their 50s consume more dairy than younger people.
I start eating non-fat yogurt and sour cream, and I start reading
those nutrition labels on food packages. I look for zero grams of
fat, cholesterol, and sodium. The carrots and broccoli are supplemented
by tomatoes and squash and onions. The chicken breasts give way to
low-fat cuts of turkey and fish. Fish — I hate fish. But suddenly
it becomes pretty tasty.
Less than a month after the angioplasty a good-hearted friend invites
this somewhat weak-hearted editor to join her at a charity ball. I
try on the tuxedo that I haven’t worn in nearly 10 years — amazingly
I can now squeeze into it. Progress. And getting out with adults and
talking about something other than my medical problems is icing on
the cake (which I don’t eat anymore).
Top Of Page
The Exercise
With the exercise program prescribed in the discharge
papers, I immediately think about walking — about the only form
of exercise I have ever engaged in since high school soccer and cross
country. Dr. George offers some simple advice: Don’t start with 30
minutes, start with 10 minutes. And build up in five-minute increments.
George recommends that I not just saunter around the block but that
I move fast enough to cover 2 miles in 30 minutes — that’s the
common pace that the experts say will raise your heart beat enough
to promote cardiovascular fitness.
Just to make the program interesting I go for 2.5 miles in 30 minutes
— that’s five miles an hour and enough to get me breathing pretty
hard. I devise a few walking courses. From work I stroll up Roszel
Road to the Carnegie Center, through the greenway to the 500 cluster
of buildings, the one with the clock tower, around the new pavilion
there, and then back, with an extra turn in our parking lot to help
fill it out to 2.5 miles.
My in-town course begins on Nassau Street at Sovereign Bank. I head
up Nassau Street to Bayard Lane and eventually back to Wiggins and
up the Linden Lane hill and back to my starting point. Brenda Fallon
loans me the Polar heart rate monitor that her husband, Bill, had
used for his marathon training. Using the standard chart I set my
target rate: 220 minus age (55 in my case) equals maximum heart rate
(165). Then, for a moderate intensity workout, the desired heart rate
should be 140 to 150 beats per minute.
For most of my in-town walk I stay in the range. Up the Linden Lane
hill, however, the alarm starts sounding — it’s a minute or so
of heavy breathing in the 150s. I refer to it as "Heartbreak
Hill."
As a newbie exerciser I get some good advice from veterans:
At my age, if you hurt you should back off or at least ease up. One
day my toe starts hurting. I skip two days until it’s better.
for me.
I am sweating like a pig. Sure enough the pounds are also dripping
away. Maybe weight loss is a lot harder than it seems, but — like
other things in life — it might also take more effort than we
at first assume. My 160 gives way to my old high school weight, 154,
and then 150.
People wonder if I am eating right. I check the scale again and it’s
in the 140s. I can’t believe it when the scale registers just 139
— that’s 21 pounds in 20 weeks. The only place where I still have
a little fat left is in that belly — serious dieters probably
could have told me it would be the last thing to go.
One day I am reading the latest edition of the Joy of Cooking cookbook.
The editor notes the new public fascination with "heart-healthy"
diets and the conclusion by some fanatics that they should ban fat
entirely from their menus. I go home and cook a chicken on the grill.
In the meantime I begin doing push-ups — to see if I have any
muscle left to develop. The first day I manage 13. But after a few
weeks I am up to 25. My weight edges back into the 140s.
Top Of Page
The Drugs
From the day of the angioplasty the prescription is
for one adult aspirin a day (325 milligrams of the wonder drug that
actually thins your blood); 75 mg of Plavix (an anti-coagulant to
reduce the chances of the blockage resuming in the area of the stent
— something that happens within a few months in about 20 percent
of the cases); and 5 mg of Zocor (an anti-cholesterol drug). Dr. Charles
Paraboschi, another Mercer Bucks Cardiology physician, visits with
me just before I leave the hospital and explains that — while
my cholesterol is low — people generally do better if they can
make it even lower yet.
But he wants some blood tests done for lipoprotein (a) and homocystein.
"Maybe there is something going on that we don’t know about,"
he says.
Sure enough, after the typical long wait for blood to be drawn at
LabCorp on Whitehorse-Mercerville Road in Hamilton Township, results
come back: My "lipoprotein little a" is at 30. A desirable
level is less than 20; 20 to 30 is borderline high risk, and 31 to
50 is high risk. The bad news is that dietary changes alone won’t
decrease lipoprotein (a) levels. Dr. George orders me to take a 650
mg tablet of no-flush niacin every day — niacin is the only thing
known to reduce it.
In March, after about a month of niacin, I have my blood tested again.
My lipoprotein (a) has jumped up to 36 — very high risk. Since
niacin and Zocor are both unfriendly to the liver, and since my total
cholesterol level is now down to 116, George cuts back the Zocor to
5 mg every three days. He ratchets up the niacin to two tablets a
day and then — after I show no immediate side effects — to
three tablets a day. My next blood work is in July. The second number
I will look at is cholesterol, the first is lipoprotein (a).
Now I wonder: For years I have lived with the false security of a
low cholesterol reading. Why didn’t any physician bother to look at
the lipoprotein (a). I catch up with Harold Gever, who by now has
left the frantic pace of his private practice and taken a position
with the Veterans Administration hospital network. Lipoprotein (a)
is not nearly as good a predictor of coronary heart disease as cholesterol,
Gever replies. By widely testing for it "you could alarm people
unnecessarily," he says.
"The story with you is that you have now demonstrated that you
can clog up your arteries. Now maybe the absolute numbers are irrelevant
— the important thing is to keep all the numbers as low as possible."
So the diet continues, as do the aspirin, Plavix, niacin, and Zocor.
The Heart Association sends out a news release extolling the virtues
of high dietary folate, found in citrus fruits, tomatoes, and leafy
green vegetables such as spinach and romaine lettuce. Drucker recommends
it, and he notes that there are no known adverse side effects. My
boys are soon going to be reminded of Popeye and his spinach.
Top Of Page
The Prognosis
The day after I come home from the hospital I get someone
to drive me out to the office. It’s payday plus one and I have to
do the checks, sign them, and get them out to understandably eager
people.
As I am doing the checks I begin to feel that same strange discomfort
— the slight pressure in the chest. So what’s going on now? I
call Dr. George and report these symptoms. Is it possible that this
artery or some other one has clogged up again in two days’ time. "Nothing
is impossible in medicine," he answers, "but in your case
it’s highly unlikely." More likely I have plain and simple heartburn.
George prescribes one more medicine: A tablet of Prevacid once a day
to combat heartburn. Within a few weeks the heartburn feeling vanishes.
That’s important, George says, to help me identify true chest discomfort
that could be an indicator of heart-related problems.
Probably like a lot of other people who have had physicians poking
around inside their heart, I begin to notice some strange feelings
emanating from my body. The trouble is I can’t tell whether they are
new strange feelings or feelings that I had all along but was too
busy to notice. Among them: My fingers suddenly go numb on me. One
unseasonably cool spring morning I arrive at work and all 10 fingers
go numb for 20 minutes or so. I go out on my walk and hit my mark:
Good news, I figure.
On some other occasions, particularly after long hours at the desktop
publishing console, my left arm feels weak. I check with George, who
notes that I passed my follow-up stress test and that with my medications
another blockage is unlikely. Maybe it’s neurological, he says. I
go to the internist, Gever’s former partner Sheryl Haber-Kuo, for
a referral but she suggests that we wait a while to see if it gets
worse. She too thinks my body probably is not announcing a stroke
or heart attack — at least not at this time. "Maybe,"
she says, "it’s stress."
Stress. I’ve done the diet, I am doing the exercise, I am taking the
pills. And I have taken a few steps to reduce stress: For the first
time ever the print date for U.S. 1’s annual business directory this
spring was pushed back a week, then another week. I just couldn’t
crank out 304 extra pages as smoothly as I used to. The extra person
hired to help out during the directory crunch this year got hired
to help out year-around.
But I am still hard-pressed to get out of this office. When I do I
am still tapping back into the office network via my modem at home.
One full day off a week does not always happen. I haven’t taken an
entire week off since around 1997.
This year I resolve to make some more changes, and not wait until
New Year’s to do it. Maybe stressed out people are no more likely
to clog their arteries than totally relaxed souls. Maybe not. But
in either case, if I am experiencing chronic, persistent stress while
working in an ergonomically-challenging environment, how do I know
if the pain in the arm or the numbness in the fingers is caused by
those external workplace hazards or by some newly clogged artery?
If the Prevacid is needed for heartburn then surely some rest and
time off are needed as an antidote to stress.
It’s another Tuesday morning, June 18, 2002. This time I am not lying
in the cath lab. I’m strapped to that desktop publishing workstation,
cranking out the last of 116 pages that have gone to the printer in
the last 24 hours.
What am I doing here?
Corrections or additions?
This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com
— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
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