Heart Attack #3...NOT! 29 Mar 1996

I'm back home now after spending a couple of days in the hospital, the first in ICU.
Wednesday AM before I got off work, about 06:50, I started having severe epigastric pain. This was exactly the same pain that I had had last Thursday down on Fork; the pain had suddenly dissipated then, but it was more severe this time. With one minor exception, this pain was exactly the same as I had had with my first heart attack, the left main blockage.
I took myself over to the ED and Eileen hooked me up to a monitor. There didn't look to be any ST changes, but I was having a bunch of PVC's & Dr. McAllister said I needed an EKG as he headed out the door.
The EKG was mostly normal, but the PVC's had increased to a bigeminal pattern; Dr. O'keefe was on now, & she gave me some drugs that were supposed to fix that. They didn't, and the pain continued. I got a sub-lingual squirt of nitro with no results. Ten minutes later, I got another squirt, and in about 2 minutes the pain suddenly subsided, then ceased altogether.
Coincidence? Maybe... maybe not.
I felt great. I wanted to go home & go to sleep. I was tired. But... Dr. O'keefe was still worried. So was Dr.Jollif, the Cardiologist. I got transported up to ICU. Within an hour I was snoozing. I slept about three hours & awoke refreshed and ready to go home. It was not to be, of course. There I remained, tubed & wired, still throwing frequent PVC's. I got a good night's sleep & Dr.Meyer came in Thursday AM & decided to do a heart cath, based on history rather than symptoms. This was fine with me; I wanted to completely eliminate any cause that could be fatal before worrying about causes that are just bothersome, like gall stones.
The cath was not really pretty, but the left branches were clear; the right, which had given me so much pain last June, looks really ratty, with multiple areas of stenoses ranging from 40% to about 95%. Nothing really acute, and nothing that would explain my symptoms. Curses!
Dr. Meyer wanted to get a cardiolite stress test(a nuclear medicine imaging cardiac study) Friday AM to completely eliminate a cardiac etiology for my pain.
I was transferred to 6West. My roommate was a really nice 75-year old man from Junction City. He had prostate CA and was undergoing radiotherapy when he had a coronary. He had a bypass, and was doing really well. He liked to talk if there wasn't anything he was interested in on the TV. He wasn't interested in too much. I know all about David now. I spent 6 hours flat time (unable to bend my right leg at the hip, due to the femoral artery puncture) listening to David. But David was wearing himself out; it was his first day up, and he had all of his relatives visiting. He has 9 kids, 18 grandkids and 8 great-great grandkids.
About 9:00 PM, David zonked out. But he didn't stop talking. Oh, no. He talks in his sleep. All night long. And it's just as interesting as his awake talk.
No breakfast again. Went down for the stress test. That study was essentially the same as the one that was done last summer; no more damage. Which means that I didn't have another Myocardial infarct. That is GOOD. But I still don't know what it was that hurt me, which is BAD. That means it'll happen again, probably several times, before it gets figgered out. But it won't be fatal, which is GOOD.
Anyway, I am definitely QUITTING SMOKING!!!! This time for real, for good, for ever.
And I really, really mean it. I do. And I Will!
P.S.... Ah, my gallbladder was fulla rocks! I had it taken out and everything is great now! And I only missed one day's work! The miracles of modern medicine!
Doug