It's a brand new year - 2014- and my husband and I begin it with a BANG! For the past couple of months he's had intermittent chest pain. Now since he's already had a previous episode like this that resulted in catheterization and a stent implant, we kind of new the drill. We start walking up the hill (we live in western North Carolina so the hills are plentiful and steep!) and suddenly he stops, clutching his chest saying he can't go on. Wait a minute or two and try again. The pain is different this time (different artery my friends) and not as typical of the "shooting pain down the arm" kind. Is there a problem or not? Go in to the heart doctor, have a stress test, ace the stress test, but have a little blip at the very end. Doctor says, "You look OK. Let's put you on some Beta Blockers and watch it."
   OK. We watch it and the pain comes and goes. Finally, enough is enough. My guy is scared. Hey, heart problems run in his family (more on that later). Call the doc and request catheterization. (Did you think that was even possible? To request a procedure as serious as that over the phone? Well it is!) Call right after the New Year and guess what? All the heart doctors are on vacation! "We'll call you back," they say.
   Then the next week you get a call. "Can you come in tomorrow morning at 7:30 am for the procedure?" the assistant asks. Husband looks at wife. Both think. Is it better to wait a few days and prepare yourself mentally or to plunge right in? We plunge!
   After  a restless night of sleep, hubby wakes wife up at 6:30, we feed all the various critters, wife gets an egg sandwich and some tea to take with, a bag of books (both spiritual and not) to tide her over, and off we go! The worst part of the whole thing is all the waiting. Go into the waiting room till they call you. Take you to the cath lab prep room and split hubby from wife. Wife goes off to the special waiting room to wait with all the other spouses. Hubby goes with the male nurse to get prepped. About an hour later they call wife back to hubby who is now lying on a gurney with all sorts of tubes attached to him in preparation of the big test. Now they get to wait together for another hour or so as nurses come and out, doctors too. All sorts of explanations of the procedure, questions whether said patient would like to be on an experimental trial for a medicine they are researching, etc...
   Turns out we're fourth in line this morning. Each cath procedure takes about 45 minutes. When they're done, they have to scrub down the lab before the next patient comes in. So ahout 10:30 am  they finally tell me to kiss Richie goodbye and off he goes to the lab. Meanwhile, I am once again sent to the waiting room. That in itself is an experience to live through because while I was waiting one spouse found out that her hubby needed a double by-pass, and since it wasn't critical (he wasn't about to die-yet), they scheduled it for the next day. Meanwhile you watch the wife try to hold it together. She's scared and rightly so.
   So what do they do in the cath lab? They do catheterizations. They insert a wire through the patient's femoral artery in their thigh, near their groin, and they snake the wire up through the arteries. When it reaches it's goal, it releases a dye. The doctor said that when they dye is released the patient will feel very warm for five seconds-a hot flush throughout the body- and he'll think he's peeing, but he's not. That dye is what tells the doctor whether there's a blockage somewhere in the arteries or not.
   If they don't find anything, off you go home! If they do, then in comes the next doctor who specializes in inserting stents. A stent is a little doohickey that they push up the artery to the point of blockage and I guess it expands and opens up the passageway so that blood could freely flow. Three and a half years ago Richie had his first stent put in. The same doctor who did that procedure is here today. He takes a look at his previous work and pats himself on the back-it was a job well done and is still holding up well (gee, that sure makes us feel good!). By the way, the stent is coated in a medicine that prevents the body from attacking it as a foreign object. (We forgot about that. The body does not like foreign things stuck up it!) On top of which, for the next year the patient will have to be taking a daily med called Plavix which does the same thing.
   So the doctor comes in after less than 45 minutes and pulls me outside to the small conference room. He points at a picture and tells me that Richie's front artery is at least 90 percent blocked (that means that there's only a 10 percent highway open for the blood to flow folks!) AND it's calcified. "Calcified?" I ask. "Why calcified?" The doctor replies that cholesterol causes calcification which in turn creates what is commonly referred to as "hardening of the arteries. " When they say that it's hard, they really mean it! They will be taking what I fondly refer to as a rotorouter and cleaning the artery out. (It's some high speed, small blade inserted into the artery that takes care of all that cacification. Can you imagine?) Then, they'll be doing angioplasty (a small balloon is inserted in the artery and blown up to open the artery-or perhaps that happens before the rotorouter, I really don't know. After all this, the stent is finally inserted and the patient is free to ...no, free to lie still.
   Because Richie agreed to the experimental drug things happened a lot quicker. The thingy that was inserted in the femoral artery was taken out immediately and they compressed the wound for 15 minutes so he wouldn't bleed to death. Then he had to lie flat for about 4 hours. Once this time was over, he was free to stand up. But because he took the experimental drug (which by the way, is supposed to be free) he had to give blood to the vampire a bunch of times during the next 24 hours.
   He stayed in the hospital overnight and about noon the next day we were free to go home. The only instructions were not to lift anything heavy for a few days. Don't over do it. That's it! Now Richie has two artificial doohickeys in his arteries. Do you think they'l;l set off the airport metal detectors?