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QUESTION:
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Reflections on my heart disease - part 2 | Kept overnight, a cardiologist strongly suggested that I should go to the Cardiology Clinic to have my heart shocked back to a normal rythmn, immediately. Which is what I did.
As they prepared to partially sedate me, (because the shock would prove painful), I made a request to the nurse. "When you sedate me, ma'm, please don't hold back!"
The key point here was that I had now established a professional relationship with a cardiologist.
As things later turned out, I was feeling this sense of fullness in my chest. And sometimes there would be this fleeting twing in my chest. So I didn't hesitate about going to my cardiologist to get his assessment. "We can do a Tread Mill Stress Test," he suggested.
I said that I tended to do extremely well on the tread mill. "How about a cardiac CT scan, instead?" I asked. What I got is called an Electron Beam Tomography (EBT) (also called the Ultrafast CT Scan).
from http://heartdisease.about.com/cs/cardiactests/a/EBT.htm
"What's new about EBT is that, through a technique called "gating", this scan is able to make images of the heart, even though the heart is moving. However, even gating the image does not render the coronary arteries visible nearly to the extent of, say, a cardiac catheterization. The EBT does not tell us directly, therefore, whether there are significant blockages in the coronary arteries.
"What it does tell us, with a high degree of accuracy, is whether the coronary arteries contain deposits of calcium.
"Calcium, for all practical purposes, does not occur in normal coronary arteries. Calcium deposits are a strong marker for the presence of atherosclerosis, i.e., coronary artery plaques, the lesions that cause narrowing of the coronary arteries, and ultimately lead to heart attacks."
After my cardiac EBT results, my cardiologist said that I should have an exploratory cathertization, which he himself didn't do. So he gave me a list of cardiologists who did the procedure and asked which one I wanted. "I don't know any of them," I said, "I guess that I would choose someone who is a Democrat!" which was what I got.
I also got an eluting stent and an angioplast. I'm participating in the heart rehabilitation program run by the hospital. I am on Plavix, Lipitor, Atenelol, aspirin, and a beta blocker. The doctors are not wasting time kidding around -- this is a full court press on my heart disease.
Here is my point -- senior citizens such as us, in my personal opinion, should not just have a stress test if that is what is being recommended, They should also ask for a cardiac CT scan, or EBT. I've known too many people who "passed" the stress test, (which is a function test), and yet later had a heart attack. And some of them did not survive their heart attack.
Face it. We are on the Home Stretch of our lives. And most of us don't know just where the Finish Line is. So it behooves us to be careful with our hearts.
Know that if there is arteriosclerosis in the arteries that feed your heart, there is also, according to my cardiologist, plaque or arteriosclerosis in every other artery running through your body -- from the arteries that feed your brain to the arteries in your feet and in all points in between. That represents a lot of territory or opportunity for something drastic, (like a stroke), to go wrong in our bodies, I think.
Since this is mostly a silent killer, feeling fine is no guarantee that we, as senior citizens, are not suffering from heart disease. If I sound like I've suddenly got religion about us folks getting evaluated for heart disease with an EBT scan at our hospital, you are correct.
And do let me know how things turned out for you. I'm sure there are many things that I can learn about my heart disease from benefiting from your shared experiences. After all, this is the Home Stretch for all of us. |  | asked by grandpa24551, 1/13/2007 |
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