I may never have the chance to travel to outer space, but I recently had the opportunity to experience first hand another marvel of the Twentieth Century.  I just had open heart surgery with a three-vessel bypass.  That’s the reason why I have not been able to tend to this blog for the last three weeks.

In the days to follow, I’ll try to keep you all abreast of developments in pharmacogenetics with maybe in the short term a little extra coverage of the pharmacogentics of cardiovascular medications.

My own heart disease was self-diagnosed.  I’m 62 years old, a non-smoker (I quit many years ago), and a fitness devotee.  Three weeks ago I set out on my customary 4-mile run when, about half a mile into the run, I experienced a very mild burning sensation along the right side of my breast bone.  Whatever this was—I thought—it sure didn’t suggest any sort of heart problem.  The sensation went away and I continued my run.

The next day I did the same run and experienced the same sensation at the same point.  Again this was a sensation and not really anything I’d call pain.  Nevertheless, recalling the lesson of the late James Fixx, a runner and best selling author who died of heart disease while running, I went to see a cardiologist and had a treadmill stress test.

Ten minutes into the stress test, dripping with sweat with a pulse of 140, I saw the nurse’s eyes get a little wider as she looked at my EKG strip.  Positive!  The next day I took the same test with a concurrent echocardiogram.  Again positive.  So I was admitted to the hospital. The next morning I had a cardiac catheterization.  Although heavily sedated,  I do recall the cardiologist who did the cath showing me the images and saying “surgical…bummer.”

So here I am, two weeks post-op.  My only real complaint is that I’m very tired, a common post-operative symptom no matter what the operation.  The doctors tell me that I should be back to most activities in three months.  I didn’t have a heart attack and there’s no permanent damage.  Every morning I look in the mirror and ask myself “can this really be happening to me?”

Enough for now.  I’m tired.   More to follow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.