explain that, I said. I quit smoking and I’ve been getting plenty of exercise. That would certainly account for why I now have a big, healthy heart, rather than the undersized little fellow I had two years ago.
“I’m afraid you don’t understand,” said the doctor. “Your heart has enlarged. I would say about a sixth. This is quite dangerous.”
He explained further.
The aortic valves leaks. Blood seeps back in. The heart is then filled above capacity. It must pump harder to rid itself of the blood. But it is fighting a losing battle. The leak is apparently bigger now than ever. The heart is pumping harder than ever. The heart is a muscle. The harder it works, the larger it becomes. The heart becomes too large, it can’t function.
“And?” I asked.
“And you suffer heart failure and you die,” said my doctor.
I asked for a couch and a six-pack. I settled for a hard chair and a glass of water.
My doctor explained some more:
The pounding heartbeat that had shaken the bed was classic for my condition.
“Cross your legs,” my doctor said.
I crossed my legs, right over left. My right leg bounced up and down with my pulse.
“Look at the pulse in your neck,” he said.
Bam! Bam! Bam! The arteries pounded out of my skin. They call that “pistol pulse.”
My blood pressure. The range was wide. Again, classic for my condition.
Still, I had suffered no shortages of breath. No chest pains. No dizziness when I was sober.
“That will come,” the doctor said.
I didn’t want to ask the question, but I asked it anyway.
“What can you do to repair this?”
“In a word?” the doctor asked back.
“Keep it as simple as you can,” I said.
“Surgery,” he answered.
There would have to be more tests, he said. He even suggested, if I so desired, that I get a second opinion. He also said the situation wasn’t critical . . . yet.
“You might be able to avoid surgery for a time, with some help from drugs and a change in your lifestyle,” he went on, “but there’s no doubt you’re going to have to have a new valve eventually.”
Change in lifestyle. No tennis?
“I wouldn’t recommend you play tennis until we know more,” he said.
I asked if I could use his phone. I called my opponent I had scheduled for five o’clock.
“I can’t make tennis today,” I said.
“How about tomorrow?”
“I can’t make that, either.”
“How about next week?”
“Nope.”
I was fighting back the tears.
“So when can you play?”
“God knows.”
“You okay?”
“Nope.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Someday.”
“Huh?”
“Someday. It finally came.”
My doctor sent me to another doctor, and that doctor listened and felt and poked and prodded and ordered more tests. I took the standard EKG and then I took something called an Echocardiogram where they send sound waves into your heart, and when they had done all that, they still didn’t know much more than they had known before, so they scheduled me for a cardiac catheterization.
I didn’t know what cardiac catheterization was, so I had to be a smart aleck and ask.
“Before we perform the new heart surgery in this country,” one of the doctors explained, “we first put the patient through cardiac catheterization. It is the best diagnostic tool we have available to us.
“We will insert catheters—little tubes—into an artery and a vein, and we will send them into your heart. We will inject dyes through the catheters so that we can take movies of the heart and of the arteries around your heart so that we can determine whether or not there is any blockage.
“This way, we can determine exactly what is your problem, we can see exactly how your heart is functioning, and we can tell if there are any hidden problems we didn’t already know about.”
That didn’t sound so terrible, but doctors tend to leave out details when they are explaining things.
Friend of mine called me a few days before I was to have the catheterization.
“Had it myself a couple of years ago,” he said.
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“Not too bad,” he said. “First, they whack open your arm and start shoving all these tubes up in you. When they get the tubes in, they shoot in the dye.
“The doctor will say, ‘This is going to burn a little.’ What he doesn’t say is where it burns.”
I never learn my lesson. I had to ask where it burns.
“Your testicles,” he said. “The dye goes from your heart to your bladder and burns your testicles. You’ll think your testicles are going to burn right off. But try not to think about it before you go in there.”
As my wife was driving me to the hospital to have my catheterization, she asked, “Something’s been on your mind for days. What is it?”
I thought it best not to tell her.
Aside from the evening I was born, I had never been a hospital patient before. First, they make you put on one of those silly gowns with no back. Those gowns have no backs so it is easier for the nurses to slip up behind you and give you a shot in your hip.
“This is going to make your mouth very dry,” said the nurse as she gave me a shot in my hip. A lot of things puzzle me about medicine. One is, if they want to make my mouth dry, then why do they give me a shot in my hip?
Next, you have to sign a release saying it is okay for your doctor to do this cardiac catheterization thing to you.
“Just sign it,” said the nurse.
“But I think I should read the release first,” I said.
“Just sign it,” said the nurse.
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