Montague reports on hospital visit

I was quick-step wheelchaired into City Hospital ER about 8 p.m. Friday and walked out  the front door about 1 p.m. Monday after 65 eventful hours in which I acquired my latest bionics.

You would think I was Bernie Madoff the way those papparazzi-like medical pros hurled questions at me, most of the time talking all at once.  I could tell they were impressed  by the way I fired back, not getting flustered despite the growing pain, the most intense ever for me, making the pain  of the first 72 hours of a hip replacement, of which I have had two -- and it is hell -- seem inconsequential. No time to tell them  I'm a newspaper guy who's fired his share of questions.

 But I just had an EKG four hours ago, I protested.  The glare back from the Pretty Woman was unmistakable: "We're doing another one, patient boy."

A few seconds later -- maybe longer, time now becoming irrelevant,  all I care about is somebody, anything ending the still-growing, no-contest, by-far-the-worst-expletive-pain of my 65 years and nine months -- PW is back, saying, with just the right drama:

"They think you're having a heart attack."

At that moment, Patient Boy thinks that, as with a number of bad Beacon Journal news management types over the years, I really could have done without this life experience. Her pronouncement sets off what my younger son, Joshua, still outside the exam room before being dismissed to the waiting room, said later was a scene that reminded him of TV's "ER." (I try to lock eyes as he turns to go, but he is gone. I have a quick thought:   The first time you hold him, you say, How amazing is this.  You think of all you're going to do for him. You don't think about how someday, unexpectedly, you'll make him part of a hectic race against your death.)

I am jumped by about 20 people -- doctors, nurses, support techs and second-job-working firefighter paramedics. They have done this  before or -- rather, and -- they have practiced the drill a lot. Very efficiently, they strip me, poke me, tape me, get aspirin down me and do all the other things to what? -- I don't know. All I know is I hurt all over, shoulders and elbows just boiling, a lattice across the muscles of my chest wall pushing against me and, finally, in the center of my chest, for the first time in my pain saga the focused soon-to-be agony inside the center of my chest --  my heart, for goodness sake -- that I always thought would  be the only pain of ticker trouble.

I am rolling on the gurney down the hallway, the City Hospital walls shining like a national guitar (forgive me, Paul Simon, the Mississippi delta metaphor doesn't work in a freakin' hallway, but your words and music were in my head). I am going  not to Graceland (but maybe I am), but to the cath lab, as in catherization, which I know means stick something in you, do some incredibly delicate work and get out without messing you up.

Gosh, what neat toys. I am awake for this, don't you know, but they have taken my glasses. Who cares? About that pain... 

Looking at really  big computer monitor screens, the picture better than HD, even in my blurry view, this plastic globe, much better than anything on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, arcing back and forth above me,  a doctor who seems to be  near my age (somehow reassuring), who obviously has great small motor skills, works with two assistants. He enters through my right groin, runs the gizmo up to my heart and puts four  -- count 'em four -- stents in the f---ed up, blocked main artery of my heart and fixes me.   And saves my ass.  His name is William Bauman.

Not 18 hours later, around noon Saturday, I have no pain, no irritation, no discomfort. And I accept the suggestion from cagey veteran in-charge nurse Marie, after she puts on me a second gown  to cover the back slit of my against-the-skin gown, to walk around the Coronary Care Unit -- packing my telemetry, of course (See photo caption below).

I discover I am the least-sick person in the place and one very lucky son of a bitch
.

Marie gives me before and after pictures of my heart. In one of the many immortal words of my legendary former boss, (Kathy Fraze):  "Sheesh." I see one of the stents opening that artery, clearing the way for the blood into my heart. In the "before" picture, nothing. 

My room phone rings.

Six hundred fifty miles away, in Marietta, Ga., north of Atlanta, a woman watches a kid baseball game. A man nearby talks on his cell phone. The woman and her husband are casual acquaintances of the man and his wife. Their 8-year-old boys are usually on opposing teams, but playing together in this "all-star " game.

She hears: Dad. Stow. Heart attack. Soccer referee. She knows he and she are transplanted Akron-area people. She texts her  brother, another Akron transplant, who lives in Charlotte, N.C.

Proverbial long story short, the woman is the sister  (didn't know he had one) of a former prominent Akron soccer referee and referee instructor. He moved to Charlotte several years ago. He's a software architect, a digital dynamo. I had just visited him and his family  in late April  on the  way to Kennesaw, Ga., for my grandson's 8th  birthday. 

It was my older son on the line when the phone rang. An hour later, John Wargo of the Charlotte Wargos, one of my three referee mentors, is on the line and we are talking small world and WTF moments.

For the record, I didn't ignore, as my blob-blabber good friend chose for his verb, the pain that started three days before my "event." 

When you have DJD (Degenerative Joint Disease), as I do, as in two hip replacements, you ache somewhere every day. You keep moving, you exercise, you hit the glorious 104-degree moving water of the whirlpool, take your medicine and move on. That ache subsides, but you know the next day something else will ache.

So, I thought the simmering in my shoulders and elbows was DJD making a call. And it went away. Next day, when my left jaw ached so much I had to sit down, I called my dentist and an hour later was in the chair and he was trying to determine if my artificial implant tooth, my $4,000 replacement for a tooth I broke, was irritating the real teeth fore and aft, as it has done occasionally. He finds nothing. The ache subsides.

My Big Friday, as it turns out, starts with no pain -- for a while. When the simmering starts in my chest wall -- it feels like muscle strain from curling a too-heavy barbell rather anything ticker-related -- I call my doc.  He is on the last day of vacation, but I will be his first patient at 8:15 Monday.  Pain goes away.

At 3 p.m., I awaken from a nap hurting -- nothing like what is to come, but thinking it's not right to get up from a nap in pain.  I go right away to the Summa urgent care place in Stow about a mile from me. I get the first EKG of the day, the first of I don't know how many over the next 70 hours. The doc says it shows nothing remarkable.

I had told him I was coming off a viral infection.  I know it was viral because I had two cold sores, one on the upper lip and one on the lower.  I am susceptible to them. The doctor theorizes that my pain episodes are viral, says I could be getting shingles -- oh, boy, I've heard about that, what fun that would be (NOT). He  tells me to see my doc (already scheduled) and go to the ER if a rash breaks out. When I leave urgent care, pain has subsided.

I go home, don my soccer kit (Brit term alert) and walk through the trees to the Oregon Corners fields next to my place to referee a U9 boys game, 6v6 on a very small field that means for me, after 22 years of doing this in all 50 states, a 25-minute walk, sit 5 minutes, another 25-minute walk. All goes well.  Everybody is having fun.  Until I start the second half.

All that pain in all those places comes back big-time. Then it ebbs. Then it comes back worse.  Then it ebbs. I end the game a few minutes early -- the score is 5-1 and a comeback is not going to happen.  I pull my cell phone out of my pocket, call Josh in Cleveland and ask him to come drive me to the ER.  I am not thinking heart, because I have intense muscle burning, not what I would call inside-your-chest pain.  I think I'm having a shingles attack.

Doh, if I had suspected heart, I would've called 911 and then Josh and told him to meet me at the ER.

 One Thing I've Learned is that EKGs, of which I've had many over the years in my yearly physicals, show a lot of things. 

But they don't show artery blockages or that a heart attack is imminent...

(There was a great British play-by-play man on German soccer telecasts who hosted a German soccer highlights show called Soccer Made in Germany that was on PBS in the US in the early '70s. Toby Charles was literate and articulate. 

His signature comment would come when there was a big flurry in the penalty area and a goal was about to be scored.  

He would state the incredibly obvious, but it was just so perfect. He would say:

"It's all happening right here!")

  ...An EKG WILL show if you are having a heart attack IF "It's all  happening right here" right then, which it did in the City ER.

 OK, I misinterpreted what the pain was signaling, but I reacted to it based on my knowledge of my body and medical advice, Now I know more.

I started smoking in the spring of '65,  completing my freshman year at Ohio University.  I quit for 17 months in the mid-'70s, resumed (I'll have just one -- Hah) and quit for good in March 1995. 

 I believe that's why I had a heart attack. (Family history -- just one instance, exacerbated by extreme non-heart problems.)

Every time I see somebody light up, I will think of the new meaning for me of jump up and bite you  in the ass.

 I have received a lot of documentation on my medicine, diet and exercise future, including the quaint pamphlet that says, in effect, in the words of an unknown humorist far more skilled than me: After a heart attack, no sex with your spouse for two weeks and no sex with someone else's spouse for four weeks.

I will be embarking on a 12-week, 3-times-a-week cardiac rehab program that I expect will get me cleared to return to the soccer field and those 9s and 10s kickers.  Even if it doesn't, I will continue as a referee mentor and licensed instructor.

 I am bummed that my big 10-week To Alaska By Car adventure, my fourth trip to the Great Land, which was to start May 29, will be postponed until 2013.  God willing, Alaska will still be there. Me, too.

Your calls and emails meant a lot.  Your friendship means the most of all.

I walked out of City on the arm of a CCU nurse because the busy nurses couldn't find a wheelchair without a hassle.  Fact is, I suspect not very many folks come into the Coronary Care Unit in a wheelchair. You  come in flat on your back. hooked up to all manner of high technology.  And, sadly, despite the best efforts of many skilled people, I also suspect a lot of patients leave on their back.

Not me, and seeing those two words I've written, I know I am being selfish.

But stepping out that door never felt so good.

~ChasSM