In July of 2022 I had a heart issue, they say it wasn’t a heart attack, so I’ll try not to call it that. I was at work pulling a pallet onto the sales floor like I do 20 times a day and I had a major chest pain. I went into the office to sit until it passed. While it calmed down slightly it didn’t correct itself. I ended up going into the ER and was kept in the hospital overnight.
The backstory: I was your prototypical meat and potato’s old-school middle-aged guy, no exercise outside of work, no vegetables, smoker and about 90 pounds overweight at the time. So, this was shocking! I had been seeing a doctor on and off about breathing problems for a few years prior.
They kept me in the hospital overnight so they could do a stress test in the morning. No food after 5 pm and hadn’t had a smoke since I went in. Around 11 am the next morning they came in to inform me the people who were supposed to be doing the test wouldn’t be around until sometime that afternoon. At that point I ripped the heart monitor off my chest by the wires and walked out of the hospital and began walking home. I tell you this part of the story to show you what a bad patient I am and sometimes I’m just an idiot.
About a week later I got in for the stress test (real emergency huh?). This is basically running on a treadmill and accelerating the pace while wearing a heart monitor. I lasted slightly over a minute before they stopped it. There was something abnormal almost right off the bat. I was assigned a cardiologist and was told I needed to get into surgery right away. Every day for the next 2 weeks was spent waiting for the call. Yes 2 weeks, the last several days of that we would call the office to see what was going on. Finally, they told me that they were waiting on the insurance pre-approval. I told them “It must not be that much of an emergency if we are waiting on money”. Within the hour I had the surgery scheduled.
As it turns out your cardiologist is not your surgeon. I wish I could say the surgery went well but the hack of a doctor forgot to order the anesthetic. I felt the catheter coming up the arm then again across my chest before he realized what was going on and ordered the anesthetic. I had that pain for months.
The result: One of the main arteries going into my heart, one had a blockage that was so old it had begun to heal itself by growing smaller veins to bypass the blockage. They told me that this was very common. They placed a stent in one area and there was another partial blockage that they didn’t stent and told me that we would keep an eye on it.
For me the recovery was simple just taking it easy for a while. I did 6 months of cardiac rehab and completely changed my diet. After graduating rehab, they gave me a shirt and a certificate I joined a gym and exercised a few times a week as it fit into my schedule. We completely changed our diet to basically chicken and turkey coupled with the exercise I lost 40 pounds before my cancer diagnosis.
Going to the gym is actually the reason my cancer was found. As I progressed through cardiac rehab and the gym every few weeks, I was able to up the level on the machines. I hit a point where I plateaued and within a few weeks had to begin going down on the difficulty. Within a month after my surgery, I got hit with COVID and my assumption was that it was still somehow lingering. It took a couple of months before I went to my doctor. Little did I know this was going to lead to my cancer diagnosis.
Next up: How I learned I had cancer.
Image courtesy of: Angioplasty and Stent Placement for the Heart | Johns Hopkins Medicine