A famous quote by Mark Twain, but it’s true in my case. I am alive, I’ve just been reconstructed [if you will], or I will. Here’s my story –

It All Began
back in late 2023, I was waking up with with my heart racing like I’d not been sleeping at’al, but involved in some strenuous activity when nothing could have been further from the truth. The first couple times this happened I was trying to remember experiencing a nightmare but there was no nightmare to re-experience, just a racing heartbeat coming out of nowhere. So I blew these off, ignoring it for a time until one day upon waking I convinced myself that maybe I ought to check it out – you know, go to see a “Cardiologist”? Why not? After all, I’d never seen one in my lifetime and I was in my late sixties so maybe it’s time. Luckily I live about a stone’s throw from Baylor Scott & White’s Legacy Heart Center, I could walk there if need be it’s so close. I called over there and they assigned me to a young Cardiologist who, on the first couple appointments did the standard EKG and this and that and she could find nothing really wrong. Well she kept digging over the many months that followed, high cholesterol was in the cards for sure and just on a whim she says, “I’m going to send you over to the other side for a “Calcium Score” test. Of course, still no urgency but in the interest of being thorough a few months later I walked out of the “Calcium Score” test thinking “I just aced this thing, no issues here!” A few days later I was sent a diagram of my heart and an illustration of where calcium deposits were found in some arteries around the heart. The fact is, I didn’t “ace” anything, I had some deposits the extent of which were still unknown but they were definitely there. The scores on this test range from “zero” [or no deposits found], all the way into the 1,000’s! My score was either a 660 or 690, I don’t remember which. Still, high enough test scores to indicate some arterial blockage existed.

The Testing Continued
That’s the thing about adding a Cardiologist to your repertoire of docs, they never stop “testing” stuff. 🙂 After the Calcium Score she says this time, I’m going to have you complete a “Stress Test”. I never had one of these, but I built an entire 30-year career completing a stress test about everyday in my daily work. When you can’t control the stock and bond markets and you can’t control the management of the firm you’re working for, and you can’t control the client you’re working for, what CAN YOU CONTROL? The answer is not a lot but your own self, and your emotions maybe. My work was the ultimate stress test in life, over and over again. However, this one was different – lab grown, I was invited into a room where two young technicians outlined what was going to happen and each one had a specific task. There was a bed next to a treadmill next to a ton of wires and monitors. They attached suckers connected to must have been 10 probes around various parts of my chest and stomach area. I completed the entire 9-minutes of a constantly inclining and faster speeding treadmill. I used to run long distances for fun and even though those days are gone I still had a little left in me. Once completed they had me quickly lie down where a tech ran over various parts of my heart with a handheld device taking actual video of the heart pumping. The techs informed me that this whole process would be read by a radiologist down the hall and I would have his opinion within 5-10 minutes. A young guy walks in the room, “I’m not the physician but he told me what to tell you”. He pointed to a repeat of a video of my heart moving showing one part of the heart expanding and contracting correctly given strenuous exercise while the other part was not moving with the same intensity. The Stress Test confirmed that I had some arterial blockages the extent of which was still unknown.

A Few Days Later
Suddenly now I’m a stent candidate because my Cardiologist after reviewing the Stress Test findings orders an “Angiogram with Dye” test. If you’ve never had one of these but you don’t mind multiple nurses and doctors seeing you lying naked on a table then maybe this test is for you? For this one I was partially sedated but that was after they prepared me for the test by shaving my groin area. You see the thing is until the doctors get you in the procedure room they always want two choices to tap into a major artery – either the groin area or the wrist so they prepare both in advance. Luckily for me they found plenty of pay dirt by using the artery in my arm to inject the dye. By now there are at least four x-ray machine cameras over my head as one doc informs me that they are ready now to inject the dye. I felt a warm rush climb up my arm but it didn’t hurt and then about a minute later I heard one doc say to the other, “did you see that?!”, and the other confirmed with a “yes”. A couple minutes later they walked over to me and said, “we’re going to unhook you here, get you over to recovery where the attending physician will come talk to you”. I was like, “did you guys insert a stent?” The answer was No, no stents today. I began thinking to myself, what could all this mean? The attending physician comes over to me in recovery and the first words out of his mouth are, “Mr. Newman, you’re a complicated case”. That’s got to be on the list of the last things you ever want to hear a physician say. But he frames that with, “we’ve seen cases like yours, it’s not that uncommon”. He informs me for the first time that one of my arteries is 100% blocked, and two others are around 70% blocked. There was my answer, a stent wouldn’t have done me any good. Instead, there’s a medical term for this condition, it’s known as having “cardiovascular disease”. Not good.

Onward Ho!
On Monday morning I get a call from my Cardiologist who never calls me. In that conversation she basically says she’s referring me to a heart surgeon at Baylor Scott and White Heart Hospital, and whatever he says is what we’re going with, and I agreed. If surgeons are good and this guy is, it takes a while to get into see them. In the meantime, I’m walking around thinking I could fall over and die any minute. This stuff from multiple docs proceeding over multiple tests gets inside your head! I was playing golf and doing whatever I do on any given week but in the back of my mind I had folks telling me I shouldn’t do any strenuous activity, no riding my bike and no Pilates classes either. In other words, stop living… frown.

Before meeting the heart surgeon I looked him up, he’s been practicing for 20 years and has a 5-star rating so that made me feel more confident. He informs me pretty quick that after looking over my case he would perform a quadruple bypass procedure, opening up four new avenues for blood to flow around my heart. My jaw dropped and my eyes opened wide, I’d never even heard of a quadruple bypass! Triple, yes, quadruple(?) No! I asked him if I could put this off until December since golf season is over in DFW that time of year. His response was “yes, because you’re not experiencing any of the common symptoms [such as shortness of breath and chest pain], but I wouldn’t go any longer than that.”

The very reason I’m sharing this [information], I was a high probability case for a future heart attack or stroke to occur had I left the condition intact. That’s the bottom line and that’s what I want [especially for] the men reading this to understand. If you’re in your 60’s or even mid 50’s and don’t have a Cardiologist(?) Get one! Heart attack and stroke are known as the “silent killers”. The fact that I added a heart doctor when I did was probably divine intervention because again, I had no noticeable symptoms.

Operation a Go-Go
The last thing you want to do is show up in the morning at a hospital knowing full well that they’re about to saw your sternum in half to reach the otherwise unreachable, then somehow they know to put you all back together just before you wake up. That’s basically what happened during my 5-hour long surgery. I think I woke up in a hospital bed in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. All I remember is there were a couple nurses in the room and I was connected to all kinds of line and tube mechanisms in various complicated ways. I had two intravenous ports, one in my upper right chest [they called this the “main” one] and another in my right arm for what the nurses termed a “back-up port”. I had three tubes embedded in my chest [which were kept in place for four days] just to drain excess blood from the chest cavity that occurred during the procedure, it is apparently not safe for them to leave that blood sitting in there.

It wasn’t long on Tuesday morning before Ladonna, a “Charge Nurse” showed up in my room. This lady was very together, had an aura of competence and confidence about her. When she said jump, the other nurses said, “how high?” She informs me that in a few minutes we’re going to get you up and walking. I said, “What the….?” I won’t repeat the rest I said as I gasped, “But I can’t breathe!” Sure enough, a Physical Therapist comes in the room, and between the Charge Nurse and a couple other nurses [organizing all my hoses and lines on rollers for mobility] they instructed me to stand up and lean on that walker and move forward. I was doing what they said but continuously adding in a faint voice, “I can’t breathe” over and over. They must be used to guys like me not being able to breathe because they wouldn’t stop cheering me on, all the way to the open door of my room wherein Ladonna instructed me to turn around in the hallway and head back to my room and to bed. So my first walk was a success but they didn’t stop there, everyday after that they made me get up and walk increasing the distance each time. I was even going up and down a short set of stairs by day three. My ability to catch a breath was the main issue because those three tubes inside my chest were putting pressure on my lungs making it impossible to catch anywhere near a full chest of good ol’ H₂O.

Within a couple days that Charge Nurse was off to bigger and better things but the constant flow of techs taking blood sugar samples, blood pressure and pulse readings and nurses shooting various drugs including pain-killers in my ports and dispensing pills and x-ray techs coming in at 3 a.m. in the morning for a chest X-ray it became virtually impossible to string together any meaningful sleep. I’m not complaining because their attention to detail at the Heart Hospital was wonderful. I found out why BSW Heart Hospitals in North Texas are rated with the best in the country. The last night I was there they all knew I was going home the next day so I thought maybe they’ll back off a little. Turns out 3 a.m. came and went and no X-ray guy this time, but I was awake for him anyway. At 4 a.m. my door opens, and it’s the X-ray guy wheeling in his portable machine. I looked over and said, “you’re an hour late!” He smiled and said, “oh, I’m just filling in, Scott is off tonight”. See(?) There’s still no rest for the weary.

The Caption Image
I captured a copy of that last chest X-ray and made it the caption photo for this writing. If you look closely you can see the presence of small wires forming loops around my sternum. These are the stainless steel wires they used to piece my sternum back together, they will serve as a permanent reminder of my surgery. It can take 6-8 weeks for these bones to meld back together. [There are a few long diagonal lines toward the bottom of the image, those are external monitors and lines they had me hooked up to, not relevant here].

So on Wednesday morning the heart surgeon himself pays me a visit accompanied by one of his P.A.’s. I’m not sure what he expected me to say but I gave him the most honest [and humble] greeting possible by saying, “Man, you sure are a tough guy to hang around”. After he smiled at my quip I thanked him saying, “You know Doc, you probably saved my life.” 🙂

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