I am writing this from another bed this week: at a friend’s house in Cornwall, happy to have woken up to the miserable damp, grey skies. Because I am alive.
After my column last week about my second heart attack and the astonishing treatment I received from Hammersmith Hospital Coronary Care Unit, both i paper and I have received too many well wishes to respond to individually.
Instead, I will thank you from the bottom of my triple-stented heart and explain why there is nothing to fear from the procedure I underwent – although it does not usually involve three hours and three stents!
Ever since the Nobel Prize-winning radiologist Charles Dotter first performed an angioplasty, inserting a balloon into a woman’s artery in 1964, the angiogram test to explore one’s arteries – where dye is injected into your arm or leg and travels to your arteries, so that an X-ray can show the extent of any narrowing – and the angioplasty surgery to insert a balloon stent have revolutionised cardiology.
Some 90,000 coronary angioplasties are performed each year in the UK (600,000 in the US). And the benefits of the procedure can be expected to last as long as 25 years or more – although it’s multi-factorial. That is, as long as you take your blood thinners to avoid the very low percentage risk of clotting.
Although it sounds daunting, the procedure is nothing to be afraid of.
If you’re as lucky as me, then Dr Henry Spiegelman (my specialist and new man-crush) will – with a voice as calm as if he was telling you that day’s lunch options – take you through the three possible post-angiogram outcomes: various heart drugs treatment only; a stent (or three); or bypass surgery.
Listening to Henry call a heart surgeon to discuss that last option was the most stressful moment of my three hours lying still under local anesthetic and a sedative, with a wire in my wrist! Fortunately, having spent 20 minutes analysing the wintry tree branches of my arteries on monitors, they decided on angioplasty.
Under the same local anaesthetic I’d been given for the angiogram, a long thin tube (catheter) is guided through one’s artery until it reaches the narrowed point. There, the tiny balloon on its tip is inflated with a little “pfft” sound. Doctors then insert a tiny mesh stent into the newly enlarged space which works with heart medicines to manage the regrowth of tissue over the stent and reduce the chance of a clot. That’s pretty much it.
Although, in my case, a second stent was required, and then a third “kissing” stent. I have no idea what Henry meant when he said, “that’s a beautiful landing”, but it sounded a lot better than when they had muttered a quiet “hmmmmm” two hours previously when they started peeking inside my rotting heart.
I can’t lie. Back on the ward, I felt concerned and emotional when I realised I still felt chest pains. Henry appeared before he went home to assuage my worries. “We’ve been bullying your heart for three hours. It will feel a little bruised,” he reassured me, before discussing timescales for driving, flying, swimming and sex.
When I woke the next morning without chest pains, feeling like a new man, I had a quiet, solitary sob, giving thanks for my third chance in life. A chance I will not waste.
I was home 24 hours later. You can be too. There is genuinely nothing to fear. Please check out that chest pain.