Journal Entry
What a day!
I went to bed at 19:00 last night and got up at 04:00, read mail, messed around on the web a while, took a shower and got ready to go get the angioplasty done. I got Karen up at 05:30 so she could go with me.
We got there right at 06:30 and everything went smoothly and I was on the table at 08:00, ready to go. Dr. Allen came over and walked me to the special procedures lab himself... he is such a nice guy!
I had told them that I didn't mind getting a little doped up, since I had been here before and nothing new was going to happen... so I thought.
Imagine my surprise when I became aware that it was 14:00 and I was still on the table!
I had known that it would not be an easy procedure; Dr. Allen was the only radiologist who was confident in performing it. The lesions that I have are just barely past the bifurcation of the aorta, in a bad position to balloon and a worse position to put stents in.
And one of the stents slipped off the stem while it was being inserted, and floated into the aorta. This, as you can imagine, was a bad situation, and I very vaguely remember it happening. So Dr. Allen had to use a wire to snag the errant stent... which is just barely, barely radiopaque... which means that it's really hard to see. He told me later that he was really afraid that I would have to go to surgery to get it out.
But he did eventually snag it with the wire, then he had to pull it completely out through the femoral puncture... making a lot bigger hole than he wanted to.
The next stent went a lot better, behaving as it was supposed to. So I have a stent in one side and none in the other. What we will do now is wait and see what happens... if the side without the stent re-occludes, he will attempt to insert another stent. If the stent side occludes, it'll mean going to the surgeon.
And my whole body is sore, mostly from laying on my back for ten hours. But I'm glad that it's over.
The dope that they commonly use is supposed to not only relax you but also make you forget... but it doesn't work that way with me, it just really relaxes me and I still have a pretty good idea of what was going on. And I remember thinking that gee, everyone seemed pretty worried, maybe I should be worried too... Nah, I'll just lay here and relax in this nice foggy world where people are in control whom I trust.
And on top of everything else, they forgot to give me my before and after pictures to post here... I wonder of that was on purpose of if they just forgot.
Before I was dismissed, Dr. Allen came over and talked to me; he was mortified. He said that of all the people that this could happen to, it had to be someone that he knew and liked.
I'm on very light duty until tomorrow night, so I think that I'll just sleep and compute and watch TV. I'm not sure if I'll be able to sleep tonight since I essentially spent most of the day semi-asleep...