I’ve had Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) for some time. This means the arteries in my heart are slowly narrowing due to plaque buildup. I first had a near miss with a heart attack in 1998 when I was living in San Diego. I was 49. The Cardiologist who treated me, Dr. John Gordon, noticed that my Left Anterior Descending Artery (also known as the Widow Maker) was 90% blocked and also that another main artery was 100% blocked and had been for some time. He noticed that I had grown my own bypass called a collateral. Whew! He stented the LAD and left the other alone. All was well for 10 years.
Then in 2007, I was out walking my dog at 10:30 pm on the friday before Labor Day and boom, a lead weight fell on my chest. The pain was pretty intense and did not stop when I stopped moving. Somehow I made it back to the house (about a 1/4 mile) and called 911. I spent the Labor Day weekend in ICU and then got a few more stents on the next tuesday including opening up the original stent which had closed down.
All was well until a year later when I woke up in the middle of the night with severe angina. I took some nitroglycerine tabs and waited until first thing in the morning and then had a neighbor drive me in to the hospital. Two days later I had another stent put in.
This disease was progressing and nothing was stopping it – not diet, exercise, statins or any other medicine. My Cardiologist , Dr. Jayat Garg, told me that there was another blockage that would not be stentable and the only eventual option was a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft – in other words open heart surgery. Oh shit. Chest cracking time.
