I was a good student. In fact, through my senior year in high school I was a very good student . I took school seriously. I studied. I did my own homework instead of beating up someone twerpier. I burned both the midnight oil AND the candle at both ends. And it really paid off. As well as a Master's Degree, I have a lifelong diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome to show for it. I now have a total of thirteen letters after my name, and my wonderful wife insists I'm no smarter than the non-English-speaking Bosnian handyman who lives next door and works out of his van. His driveway is always shovelled before mine after it snows. His garden hosts footlong cucumbers. The weeds were so thick in my 'garden' this past summer I couldn't even find my peppers. And his parrot is bilingual. My dog still eats his poop.
In addition to the hard-earned bowel twisting I received as a reward for all that study-induced anxiety, I was bequeathed a fantastic set of bodily organs primed for an early demise. My mom was hypertensive. I guess the focus of that diagnosis is in the word 'hyper', as in the heart is pounding out blood like a sugar-infected 5 year old boy without a nap who's running amuck in the ball pit of the children's museum. Plastic balls, like my mom's blood cells I suppose, are thrown violently and unrelentlingly against the walls of the pit. People are beaned randomly. Eyes are blackened. And eventually even the underpaid museum workers, unable to contain the ravages of the out-of-control urchin, flee for their own safety. I guess that's how it is with hypertension. Stuff just gets overwhelmed by all the out-of-control multi-colored blood balls bouncing around those thin walls, and when it eventually spills into their territory, they can't handle it and shut 'er down.
My dad had all sorts of heart and vein problems. He had something called angio-plasty done when I was a kid. Now when you're about 12 years old and you hear a word like 'angio-plasty', all sorts of things pop into your mind. Of course I could have asked what it meant, but then I might have actually learned the truth, which is much too irrelevant for a boy of 12 than the other possible alternate realities. And of course at that time, the internet - though widespread already in the bicentennial year of '76 - was not yet available on computer. So looking up a definition, which these days is just a Google away, back then took unbelievable amounts of toilsome energy and focus. The dictionary had to be located, opened, and flipped through. The entire alphabet had to be recited over and over again as you fingered through 'ana' to 'ane' to 'ang' and so forth. And that assumes you could spell the unknown word close enough in the first place. I couldn't find my own underwear in the drawer, much less spell a word that sounded like it originated in the Congo.
So for me, angio-plasty will always be this ultra cool process where the doctors implanted thousands of little microscopic robots into my dad's heart. They basically ruled that place, keeping the blood in line and making sure the heart pumped like it was supposed to and things of that nature. Every once in a while they'd hike down the arteries and back through the veins (I knew that much when I was 12!), scouring the walls with steel wool (my mom showed me that that stuff could clean anything) and toting back any straggling blood cells.
Five years ago, my dad presented me with another ominous foreshadowing of my constitutional shakiness. He had a quintuple bypass, and for those of you not versed in the German language, that means he had 'five' bypasses. Now that I'm older and wiser and - thanks to the internet - have instant access to every piece of knowledge ever known or invented by any scholar or schmuck, I can explain exactly what a quintuple bypass is. It's like when you're already fifteen minutes late for the wedding of your wife's cousin's daughter and you're flying down the interstate with her curling her hair with something plugged into the lighter socket of the car, and you see your exit on the cloverleaf but it's closed for repair. So you drive five miles further, turn around and head to the onramp going the other way. Of course, there's a six-car pileup in front of that one, and you can't get on there either. You try going a different way off the next exit and that one's closed. That's it. You can't there from here.
And so it was with my dad's heart. It couldn't get to the wedding. So, we dropped him off at the fix-it-up shop and about six hours later the surgeon, drenched in sweat (hopefully his own) padded out to the waiting room (with his shoes covered by little blue booties) to tell us that the surgery was a success. And that's just how easy the quintuple bypass was. I'm sure there was a lot more to it behind closed doors, but for me it was pretty pain-free. I did strain my eyes from trying to finish my article on flyfishing in Montana, though.
Needless to say, I lived my life a lot more cautiously and health-oriented after that experience. I lowered my portions of red meat to only two a day (except on BBQ days and SuperBowl Sunday.) I switched from drinking my Pepsi straight from the can to pouring it over ice to dilute the calories. (I read that on Wikipedia, I think.) And I limit myself to no more than two Twinkies (or other acceptable Hostess substitute, including SnoBalls, which should be a national treasure) per sitting. I would beat my own family history through perseverance and determination.
Despite my valiant efforts, I lost. I was trying to buy some life insurance several years ago and the nice insurance company nurse toted her black bag into my living room at about 5 a.m. on a Sunday and drew my blood and made me sign things before I could find my glasses. I don't think my blood was awake yet. After a few days, I received the results of the blood test (for which, I regret, I failed to study.) My triglycerides were much too high. And I think my biglycerides and octoglycerides were pretty lousy too. My good cholesterol was bad and my bad cholesterol was horrible. (I'm looking that up on Wikipedia when I'm done. That don't make no sense no-how.) Overall, despite my outward appearance, which some have said is next to godliness (HEY, I never said it!), internally my stuff must have been breaking down.
So I did what any red-blooded man with almost godly looks would do. I dieted and exercised for three months, dropped weight, fixed my blood, got retested, passed, bought insurance cheaper, then forgot all about the whole damn mess and went back to my regular rations of French Onion dip and twice-fried potatoes. Thank God for short attention spans...
And now, years later, I find myself scratching my head in befuddlement after being released from the heart unit the day before Super Bowl Sunday (which would make it a Saturday)after being admitted for chest pains. How could this have happened? How could I have let my body morph back into my fat jeans again? I thought I threw them away, but NO! There they were in the plastic bag in the basement TAUNTING me, making it impossible for me NOT to wear them. And I have only one person to blame for letting myself return to that state of blissful slothliness: the Golden Crisp bear, because I really couldn't get enough of that Golden Crisp.
Alas, I was stricken with chest pains, suddenly, unannounced and horrifying. Like a blitzkrieg attack on my torso, they struck as I was hopping around the bed trying to put on my sock so I could go to my new, relatively unstressful job. Something grabbed my chest like one of those spring-loaded chest pulling muscle-izers the meatheads use to show off with at the gym. The pain was intense. I of course, tried to blow it off. I got in my car and went to work, figuring it was just gas. The wonderful ladies I work with looked at me and said something to the effect of, "Get your ass to the ER now or I'll never bring you cake at work again!" So I went. I was admitted. And I was given the entire battery of heart-related tests to make sure my ticker wasn't like the octoglycerides I had that were falling apart.
But there's a happy ending to all this! Turns out my heart is in GREAT shape. (I attribute that to my healthy lifestyle.) Turns out it probably WAS gas. And the best part? I made it home in time for SuperBowl Sunday, during which I was able to celebrate passing the stress test (for which I didn't study!) by eating three bowls of chile and about one third of a cheese ball. (OK, the last part of the paragraph was just fantasy. My wonderful wife has decided to stand watch over the fridge with her hair straightener and is allowing me to eat only 'heart healthy' things now.)
But hey, it was a great game!
