Lets Do It

Cardiac Vascular & Thoracic Surgery. The concept sends chills down my spine since it inevitably conjures up images of white gowned surgeons sawing open the chest cavity and dipping their hands into your core. This is in fact what actually occurs and there’s no denying that one is facing their own mortality when undergoing such a procedure.

Luckily, in the case of bypass surgery the success rate is better than 99%. By success I mean surviving the actual surgery itself. I haven’t delved into the long term survival rate after the surgery in terms of heart failure. Maybe in a later post after I do some research at the Library of Medicine I’ll post something about that. In my case I’m sure they think that by grafting new arteries onto my heart I will avoid a fatal heart attack in the short term in any case.

My appointment with the surgeon is the thursday following the catheterization procedure. Since there are about  dozen surgeons in the surgical practice at Fairfax Inova Hospital I wound up choosing my surgeon sort of randomly. Dr. Lucas Collazo was the first one who had an appointment opening so I took him. Lucky me. This guy has a resume a mile long and fixes the hearts of little babies. I’m guessing he can probably fix a big baby like me.

So Thursday rolls around and I show up for my appointment. The Nurse does all the poking and prodding and paperwork and then Dr. Collazo walks in. Nothing like I expected. I thought he’d be brusk and businesslike and no nonsense. Say a few words and off we go. Not so. He walks in and introduces himself as “Lucas Collazo” with a warm friendly smile. We sit down to talk and he explains that he’s seen all the data from the catheterization procedure that Dr. Garg sent over and thinks he’ll need to do a triple bypass but is not 100% sure that will be all until he’s in there. I explain that I work at the National Library of Medicine and have done a lot of research on the procedure and talked to several people who have undergone it or whose spouses did and described the recovery pretty thoroughly.

I also have a friend at the library who’s a retired cardiac surgeon and who has described everything about the procedure. He’s impressed. We chat for awhile about dogs and iphones and Macs and then he says by way of wrapping up the conversation – “How about next wednesday?”

Duh. Man that quick? I thought I’d have a couple of weeks to get ready. I still had a lot of stuff to do around the house that I wouldn’t be able to get to after surgery and I was counting on that couple of weeks. Still, the sooner I get it done the sooner I get back on my feet.

So I said sure, “Let’s do it”.