I Heart You Very Much

Hey - those of you looking for updates on the Mister will be able to find them here for the foreseeable future.  Facebook just isn't the right place to give all the details.

How we got here:  as you probably know, the Mister is type II diabetic.  Neither one of us took very good care of ourselves over the last 20 years, but we've both cleaned up our act in the last 6-8 months.  His hemoglobin A1C (cheat-proof blood sugar test) is better than its ever been, and he looks downright hawt.

But also in the last few months, other health issues have been cropping up.  He developed a severe infection in his right foot in early August which resulted in six weeks of IV antibiotics and amputation of his pinkie toe.  About three weeks ago, he was complaining that he felt tired all the time - well, who wouldn't after all that?

Then, last Thursday, he started wheezing and complaining of shortness of breath. He went to our family doctor who diagnosed bronchitis and sent him home with antibiotics and cough syrup, but also sent him to have a chest x-ray on Friday morning.

From Friday until Monday morning, he only slept maybe 4 hours.  The rest of the time he spent trying to get comfortable...everytime he would lie down, he would gag and cough horribly and have to sit back up to catch his breath.

I nagged him to go back to the doctor on Monday, where he learned from the x-ray results that he had fluid in his lungs.  The doctor gave him a diuretic called Lasix to help get rid of the fluid but also told him to go to the ER if anything got worse.

On Tuesday morning, he woke up with sharp neck and shoulder pain.  By 11 a.m. I had nagged him into the ER (do you see a pattern here?), where they did an EKG and a bunch of blood work.  And that is when we learned that he had suffered a major heart attack sometime within the previous 4-5 days. 

The crazy thing is that neither of us know when it happened.  When I think "heart attack", I think of Fred Sanford clutching his chest with one hand and holding the other one up to heaven, hollering, "I'm comin Elizabeth - it's the big one!"

The Mister did no such thing.  He coughed a lot and couldn't sleep and used all my good asthma drugs, but there was no chest-clutching at all.

Another irritating byproduct of type II diabetes is diminished kidney function (some of you may recall with fondness his kidney stone surgery 2 years ago).  Why is this relevant?  you are asking yourself.  Well, I will tell you.  Heart attack victims need to undergo a heart catheterization to figure out why the heart attack occurred and what needs to be done to fix it.  A heart catheterization involves shooting contrast dye throughout the cardiovascular system, then shoving a camera tube up through an artery in the groin and into the heart to see what's what.

Kidneys don't like the taste of contrast dye, even on a good day, and they really really don't like it when they're not working well.  It might even make them shut down the office and call it quits.

Everyone's kidneys put out this protein called creatinine;  normal creatinine level for fine folks such as yourself is around 1.1 or 1.2.  The Mister's creatinine has been 1.7 for the last couple of years;  yesterday it was 1.9 and today it is 2.3.  It has to go below a 2 before anybody will even think of shooting him up with contrast dye.

So...right now we wait and let the good people in the intensive care unit get his kidneys to straighten up and fly right so he can have a heart cath.  Once he has the heart cath, we will know for sure the extent of damage to his heart from the attack and what needs to be done to help him get better.  According to the cardiologist, and based on the echocardiogram (aka heart ultrasound), about 50% of the Mister's heart is not working at the moment.  There is also something called an EF, or ejection fraction, that tells the MD how well his heart is pumping.  I think the phrase ejection fraction sounds a tad suggestive, but then again, my mind is generally somewhere near the gutter at any given point during the day.

At a minimum, he will have an angioplasty (aka, the balloon thingie) in the next few days...but it is also possible that he may need stent(s) and even perhaps bypass surgery.  Won't know until they can do that doggone heart cath.

Check back here for updates tomorrow and through the weekend.  Love from the Missus.