After reading Pam Linn’s 4/25/02 column, I am extremely sensitive to the similarities and differences between her friend’s cardio experience and ours.
The UCLA Medical Group doctor here in Malibu, who recently gave my wife a physical, noticed a slight heart murmur. Being a somewhat proactive doctor (affiliated with the HMO Secure Horizons) and noting my wife’s 65 years of age and very active lifestyle, she ordered a heart echocardiogram. To our great surprise and dismay, it detected a benign, one inch plus tumor inside her heart that had to be immediately removed since it could cause a massive stoke at any time. Open heart surgery!
So, after an angiogram and carotid echocardiogram to determine that the rest of her cardiovascular system was in good shape, we got up at 3:30 a.m. last Monday and drove down a deserted, drizzly PCH to the UCLA – Santa Monica Medical Center.
Carroll looked like hell when they wheeled her out of the operating room (but you should see her in a leotard in the gym). plastic tubes everywhere. The next day she was sitting up and was fairly conversant. The third day she was tube free and walking around the hospital corridors. I brought her home Thursday, the fourth day, and the first thing she did was to check her garden to see that I had watered everything. Sunday we met some friends at the Malibu Inn for breakfast.
An experience like this causes you to very quickly sort out who and what are most important in your life. A very sensitive doctor noting a seemingly harmless murmur, checked further. Couple this with an extremely talented surgeon and an otherwise healthy, in-shape patient, and a happy outcome resulted.
Why such a good outcome? Genes, lifestyle? We work out, dance at the Bluffs Park Center Monday nights and many weekends, hike, drink beer with the guys after I play handball. . .
The important thing, we do all this together and have since 1960. Maybe the right frame of mind helps.
Kal Klatte