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Amaroq -> OT: Heart attack (7/11/2006 7:13:37 PM)
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I'm sorry I haven't been on much recently.
The short form of the story is that I suffered a minor heart attack last week. I'm okay - I've no lasting damage, I'm in good spirits, and I have been discharged from the hospital to convalesce at home. It'll be a few weeks before I'm back to 100%, but the long-term prognosis is very favorable.
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The long form of the story is that I began experiencing minor chest pain last Saturday, and had several episodes of it over the next few days. I'm 32, so a heart attack was somewhat unexpected, but the severity of it Thursday morning was unignorable, and I went to the emergency room.
I got there about four hours before the heart attack started, which meant that the doctors were able to perform an angioplasty before any significant damage occurred to the heart itself.
When they did the angiogram, they found that I had a 99% blockage of the left anterior descending artery, the major artery down the front left side of the heart.
For an angioplasty, they inserted a catheter in the femoral artery at my thigh, and ran it up to the heart, where they inflated a balloon to crush some of the blockage, and expand the artery enough to let full blood flow through. They then inserted a stent, which is a metal latticework cylinder, to keep the artery at this new, wider dimension.
Then they were done and out - though there was some excitement about hemorrhaging in the thigh, something about the wisdom of giving a fellow blood-thinning drugs which essentially turn him into a hemophiliac, then punching a hole in the femoral artery [:D] - and I was taken to the ICU for further observation.
The kicker of it is, I was awake and not on pain medication throughout the entire thing. Its a scary thing to know that this would likely have been fatal fifty years ago, and certainly seventy years ago, and now is something that you can watch live on TV.
They kept me under strict observation for two nights, and then let me go home: apparently, there was minimal damage to the heart muscle, and no complications elsewhere (though the bruise on my thigh still has me limping).
Anyways, its been home and bed rest since, but again the long-term prognosis is very good.
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Its fun to see the board so vibrant and active - welcome aboard, you guys! Hopefully I'll get back up to contributing, but this note took me two days over three typing sessions [;)] so I'm not expecting too much.
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