Heartbreak of Another Sort
You’ll know when you’ve reached that golden age, when suddenly you become a magnet for all sorts of medical interventions. Are your joints stiff? How about a knee or hip replacement? Blood pressure jumped up a few notches? We’re happy to handle that with medications. Cataracts? Let’s banish those and improve your vision instantly. Once you’re on diabetes meds, you’ll be dancing across television screens amid pastel flowers and happy music as long as it takes to list the myriads of side effects.
It’s no mystery why you’re popular with the medical community: Medicare. Most seniors have medical coverage, and although it pays a lower “allowable rate” for procedures, medical providers don’t need to worry whether the patient will pay or default. Medicare comes through.
That brings me to the core question concerning me this week. When your intention is to avoid outliving your money or your health, how much medical interference do you want to tolerate? The medical community, understandably, strives to save your life first and foremost. But an individual patient needs to assess the pros and cons of intervention in the natural aging process.
Here’s the current conundrum: Farmer Husband had an angiogram a week ago. He’d already been through several tests that showed a possible partial blockage such as a calcium score test, stress test, and an echocardiogram. He was told that once they did the angiogram, a diagnostic procedure where they do x-rays using contrast dye to visualize blockages in your blood vessels, they would do an angioplasty to open up narrowed or blocked arteries using a balloon catheter and stent placement. Keep in mind that I’m an author, not a medical professional: this is all written from a patient’s bird’s eye view.
The doctor came back after the angiogram, drew this diagram on a whiteboard, and said Farmer Husband needed a surgical consult because his heart looked like this. One artery leading into the heart was ninety percent blocked, one was eighty percent blocked, and the other was sixty to seventy percent blocked. He didn’t use the stents because they don’t believe they are effective if the blockage is over seventy percent.
They recommended triple bypass surgery and scheduled it three weeks from now. The heart surgeon came in offering to answer questions, but we were too unfamiliar with the subject to know what all we should ask.
Farmer Husband was still loopy from the twilight anesthesia they’d given him for the angiogram.
Since then, we’ve availed ourselves of YouTube, which he considers to be an authority on most any subject. Please note that he has not had any symptoms other than occasional fatigue, has never smoked, but is taking meds for high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes. He’s on the fence whether or not to have the surgery, now that he knows they’ll be cutting through his sternum, and extracting other veins to do the patchwork.
If you’re reading this and have had bypass heart surgery, or have opted not to have it, I’d be happy to hear from you.
