American Fez

Health on the Installment Plan

Is there anything to say about etiological-extrinsic-cardiomyopathy that hasn't already been said? Frankly, I have no idea. My eyes always start to glaze over whenever anyone raises that subject, and so the entire etiological-extrinsic-cardiomyopathy discussion remains a closed book to me. I suppose I should be interested considering my condition, but life is too short, even if a general familiarity with the basics of etiological-extrinsic-cardiomyopathy might actually lengthen mine by a year or two.
Fortunately, since I've left the hospital, stethoscope-toting medicos no longer stop by my bedside to deliver their incomprehensible, multisyllabic lectures about what's wrong with my heart and arteries. However, sometimes listening to the perfunctory doctors was worse than not listening to the long-winded ones, since they would insist on calling my Coronary Artery Bypass Graft by its unpleasant acronym: CABG.
"When is your cabbage scheduled?" they would ask, as if my heart was being stuffed with some sort of boiled leaf vegetable: a permanent Saint Patrick's Day feast in my chest.
But all that is ancient history now. My recovery began with slow and steady progress but is speeding up in installments. Each installment seems to unveil a new me: a more active me; a less achy me; a me who is occasionally forgetting that he ever experienced surgery. Indeed, I can barely remember how it felt to require assistance when standing and shuffling two feet across the floor. It's rather like paying off a large debt: there is a little less interest to pay each month as the debt declines.

Worry Warts

The hardest part of recovery is convincing your anxiety that you're actually going to be okay now. Since heart disease struck so swiftly and stealthily before, a neurotic mind considers it highly likely that it could spring another surprise attack at anytime. Heart disease becomes the cleaver-wielding maniac lurking in the bushes; the lone sniper in the book depository; the deadly poison floating in the goblet of Borgia wine; the viper clasped to the bosom, literally. It's rather like being an unpopular world leader with a constant fear of sudden assassination. No wonder that Colonel Gaddafi employs his own full-time medical staff in a secret clinic equipped with a state-of-the-art operating theater, turbo-charged wheelchairs and twenty-four-hour helipad.
For regular people, however, health paranoia is most acute when insurance companies refuse to cover the cost of medications ordered by their doctor. For instance, I was prescribed 40mgs Lipitor but my insurance would only pay for 40mgs of inferior Crestor. Does the forbidden drug cost more than the drug I'm allowed to have, the neurotic mind worries, because it causes excessive gas, stomach cramps, and all those other horrible side-effects that deceptively soothing voices recite at high speed in the last five seconds of TV commercials? Or is it so much cheaper simply because it is downright less effective?
My health insurance furnished me with five pages of justifications for rejecting the Lipitor prescription. I read through them twice but was none the wiser. It was like receiving a quarterly 401K report prepared by Tweedledum and Tweedledee with pie-charts and graphs drawn by M. C Escher.
According to my calculations, this Lipitor and Crestor cost differential could easily be made-up if the insurance company reduced the amount of printed health bulletins and new laminated membership cards they mailed to me each month. In fact, I am certain that such cost-saving measures would lower the ruinous price of health care premiums by vast amounts. But that, of course, is someone else's battle. I'm too preoccupied with my anxiety to fight it.

Simple Exercises Even You Can Do

During my long convalescent period after heart surgery I re-read Coleridge's classic poem Kubla Khan, which concludes with the famous lines "For he on honey-dew hath fed/And drunk the milk of Paradise." And I thought to myself: the honey-dew is probably safe, but I bet there's a sack load of fat and cholesterol in that milk of Paradise. Obviously I am not the sort of person who would have thrived in the stately pleasure dome at Xanadu, since it does not appear to have been a particularly heart-healthy establishment.
Alas, even great literature provides no respite from the gloom of coronary artery disease, merely reminding the post-operative reader that he can no longer take advantage of all life has to offer. Rather he must adhere to strict dietary rules, maintain a rigorous program of physical exercise, and remember to take his pills every morning and night. Never completely cured, heart disease remains sleeps in your system with one eye open, like a killer shark floating silently through the channels of a blood-red sea.
My own regimen will probably not make a much sense to you, but there is method in my madness, it's just not a particularly sane method when considered from most points of view. After all, it was slavishly following the path of a conventional lifestyle that led me into these dark, cardiological woods in the first place. An unhealthy forest of fat where the deadly cholesterol beast lurks and no person with a family history of heart disease can feel secure.
Anyway, whatever, my day begins with several laps around an Olympic sized pool; or at least it would do if I was not embarrassed to take my shirt off in public because of the huge scar running down the center of my chest. Unfortunately, I must hide myself away like a Frankenstein and interact with the world via Internet instead, limiting my breakfast to a single cup of coffee and small fat-free yogurt.
My non-existent swim concludes with self recriminations for not knowing how to check my own blood pressure. To take my mind of this failure I start thinking about lunch. I usually consult the Herbivore's Delight for healthy options, but the recipes are far too complicated for me to even consider so in the end I just sling some bits of salad together.
After lunch: siesta.
Unfortunately, sleeping during the day always leaves me feeling groggy and listless, which means the rest of the afternoon is a total write-off and it's pointless to schedule any activities whatsoever. At work I become the most observant of clock-watchers. If someone walks into my office I either pretend to be on the phone or hide under the desk. Should I be found hiding under the desk I simply plead that the effects of my recent surgery have left me tired and full of pain, and that I need to lie down for a few hours.
My evening meal is a twist on the FDA's approved Food Pyramid: it's more of a Food Igloo. This special frozen menu comprises ready-made dinners from the freezer which are carefully microwaved, then liberally slathered with fat-free dressing and washed down with a glass of heart-healthy red wine. Bon appetit.
When dinner is over and the dishes have all been left in the sink for someone else to do, it is important to re-connect with the world again by watching reality television in bed: a particularly effective form of anesthesia which is obviously the highlight of my daily regimen.
As I stated earlier, such a strict and rigorous program isn't for everyone, but I find it helpful and stimulating.

Grand Guignol

I am far too squeamish to contemplate my own anatomy for very long, especially when someone's been poking around inside it, retouching and remodeling irreplaceable bits and pieces. Those organs seem so alarmingly fragile in pictures, like little blood bubbles that might instantly pop if tapped with a pin, never mind a scalpel. And they're all wedged in there with absolutely no wiggle room, almost as if the entire system were spring-loaded, primed to explode all over the operating room if the wrong rib is accidentally disturbed during a procedure.
Indeed, considering the number of components in our human bodies, their convoluted design and awful sliminess, it is amazing that more surgical disasters do not occur. No doubt we can thank technological innovation for this lack of tragedy. For instance, so futuristic was the equipment at M.G.H that I remember wondering whether I was still on the operating table in Boston, or if I had been abducted by aliens from an advanced civilization and was now aboard their flying-saucer space hospital. Either way, I knew that I was in safe hands, no matter whether those hands belonged to an Earthling, or were the long-fingered claws of some little green extraterrestrial heart specialist with a five-brained head that looks like a squid's head.
Of course, our descendants in 2050 will hopefully regard today's surgical techniques as barbarously primitive. They will consider modern open heart surgery to be as gruesome as Victorian amputations with a hacksaw appear to us. Alternatively, it's also possible that surgery could be so expensive by then that hospitals simply won't bother performing it anymore, unless the patient is super-rich. Everyone else will just be told to take it easy and sent home to drop dead when the fatal hour arrives.
So, on the whole, I am grateful for having had my bypass now, even if the experience has, at its low points, felt a little like being Dracula waking from eternal slumber when a stake is removed from his accursed heart.