My heart attack story Part 3 - I land at the medical center

 So after the chopper landed (see parts 1 & 2) they didn't waste any time at all pulling me out of the chopper, popping the lags with wheels on them out, and rushing me into the building at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Keep in mind that I was wrapped in a big blanket, with my hands crossed at my waist and strapped down with only my face peeking out. All I could see was various types of hospital corridor ceiling rushing by, punctuated by lefts and rights and going through doorways. It was like a movie.

Next thing you know, I'm in the catheterization lab, they unstrap me from the gurney, slide me off of it onto a long narrow metal table and a whole new crew of people are talking to me. The chopper crew grabs their gurney, straps and blanket and gets out of there. The doctor who seems to be in charge of what is now playing out talks to me, he seems like someone I'd want to hang out with.

I am told to grab a thing like a shovel handle with my right hand and not let go. It can be rotated on a couple of axis points to adjust the angle that your hand is at, and they go to work. I'm a bit loopy at this point, just sorta floating. Maybe it was the drugs they gave me, maybe it was something physiological because the bloodflow to a major part of my heart had stopped at that point.

In any event, I wasn't feeling stressed, it was all just interesting. I felt the cut at my wrist where they entered my artery system with the catheter equipment (I didn't ask what the gadgetry is called, but I asked plenty of questions, they seemed to find me entertaining LOL).

I could feel the device moving through my body, up my right arm, around the corner, and across my chest. There wasn't really any discomfort from it, maybe from the meds or maybe because the chest pain itself from my heart muscle fighting for it's life was worse than the gadget being fed through my arteries.

There is an xray machine moving around, getting several angles of live video of what is going on inside my heart. I figure out that if I roll my head to the left, I can watch the progress on a huge monitor. It was surreal to see contrast dye being injected into my own heart arteries, watch it flow, then abruptly stop at the blockages. There were six in all. The least restricted one was 70% blocked, the worst was completely blocked.

I am pretty sure that they opened up the totally blocked one and maybe used the catheter to shove past some of the others and force them open, but I am not sure. I will ask the cardiologist about this, or maybe the guy who actually did the procedure. He was cool and I'm sure he'd be happy to explain exactly what they did.

The chest pain stopped. I was wheeled from there to the cardiac wing which is a state of the art facility just a couple of years old. That would be my home for the next week while they tried to determine what to do next.

I was covered in wiring, had IVs in, and had an inflatable tourniquet on my right wrist to keep pressure on where they had cut into my artery. Every hour or so a nurse would come in with a syringe and bleed some air out of it & watch to be sure I didn't bleed.

I met the nurses and some doctors in the team, then laid there resting. At some point, my wife and daughter arrived. Being still under the effects of the fentanyl they gave me during the procedure, I am told I said some weird stuff LOL...but what else is new?

Over the next week, I had EKGs, CAT scans, endless blood tests, xrays, and all sorts of testing. At one point there were two different teams of people working on either end of me with portable ultrasound machines, one was inspecting my carotid arteries and the other was checking out the veins in my legs to see which ones they would want to pillage to repurpose as cardiac arteries because at the time they were planning to do open heart bypass surgery which would involve taking power tools to my sternum and a very long recovery time during which I'd be very, very fragile.

After all of this testing, the surgeon decided that the because of exactly where the blockages were, the risks involved in the bypass procedure outweighed the chances of success, so the decision was made to send me back to the cath lab for a series of stents to be installed that would fix MOST but not all of the blockages.

After being there a few days, I started to notice that there were a whole bunch of sensor pads stuck to me that weren't being used for anything, so I asked the nurse if I could take them off. Everyone who had dealt with me on that first frantic day had stuck things to me...the 1st ER, the chopper crew, the cath lab people, other people who tested me etc.

Most of them came off easily, just ripping some hair out. A couple left bruises. Then I realized that there were two good sized patches stuck to my back and side, those were the defibrillator pads the chopper crew had stuck to me in case I flatlined in flight. They were adhered really well. One took out a whole lot of hair when it came off, the other took hair AND the top layer of skin in an area the size of a silver dollar.

The next phase of this adventure involves the stent procedure, where they used lasers, balloons and little wire supports to reline my arteries. That will be continued in the next post.