Just in time for the Holidays, December 15, 2021 — My heart issues initially began way back in 2003, when I first experienced severe angina after a long night of dancing with my lovely nieces at our local Shrine Club in Muncie, IN. Doctors at Ball Memorial Hospital recommended I have a stent placed in my anterior artery.
I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I wanted the angina gone, so agreed to the procedure. Things went well, and I walked out the next day a new man, angina-free… for the next eighteen years, anyway. I credit the regular intake of amino acids arginine and citrulline to boost my nitric oxide for the longevity of the stent.
Yet in December of 2021, right in the middle of the great Covid Con, I started feeling that old familiar tingling in the left arm and tightness in the chest. Living in Brown County by then, I went to nearby Columbus Regional Hospital (CRH) and received the news that a triple bypass was the best remedy. Now, whether it truly was or not may be open to debate, but the heart scans they presented proved quite convincing, and so in spite of my inherent distrust of the medical industrial complex, I agreed to the procedure.
In recovery I woke up with drain tubes drooping out of my chest (oh, those were fun eventually being yanked out, I can tell you), with a very nasty bruise along the entire inside of my left thigh where doctors had harvested the blood vessels they needed for the bypass. I soon learned that what had been predicted to be a triple bypass had turned into a quintuple!
Back then I had only heard of quadruple bypasses, which made sense to me since the heart has only four primary arteries, and brought this up with my surgeon during one of his post-op visits. The good doctor allowed that yeah, once they crack open your sternum and get a good luck at the mess you’d obviously made of your heart, they can pretty much perform as many bypasses as needed to correct your plumbing.
Out of curiosity, I asked, “So Doc… what’s your personal best?” “Ten”, he responded. I have since learned he has managed to raise his personal best to 12.
Hmmm… I wonder if they get trophies for such milestones….
In any event, what should have been a 5-7 day recovery didn’t quite pan out. After being released from hospital and recovering at home, I continued to have difficulty breathing, and within a few days found my sorry ass back at CRH for treatment.
You can probably guess what came next. This was late December 2021, after all, in the heat of Covid hysteria, so I was duly administered the infamous polymerase chain reaction test (PCR). The dependability of PCR tests came under considerable scrutiny and doubt back then… something to do with the number of amplification cycles used.
Which for an old guitar player brings to mind a Gibson Byrdland pushing a Marshall Plexi… you can generate a lot of useful feedback with a rig like that.
And certainly, PCR tests of that era were useful to hospitals being paid premiums by our illustrious government for positive Covid cases.
That is, if one is the cynical type.
In any event, for six weeks I was in and out of hospital, culminating in my being sequestered in “the Covid ward” in a private room with a view on the lofty 6th floor of the hospital, where nurses fearlessly attended me and doctors decked out in high-tech, airtight helmets and portable oxygen generators dropped by to say hi.
To their credit, the CRH doctors never suggested I go on a ventilator, which we have seen to be virtually the kiss of death for a great number of Covid patients subjected to it. After a week or two on the 6th floor, I was released with a prescription for a home oxygen generator.
The entire experience was surreal, to say the least. But I was to learn soon enough that the devil had a slew of additional challenges in his evil bag o’ tricks to toss my way, all intended to make me doubt my faith in God. More to come on all that.
The devil really is a dumb-ass, when you stop and think about it. He actually thought escorting Jesus up a mountain to tempt the very Son of God with the entire world could maybe convince Him to kneel down and worship the world’s greatest asshole… what was he thinking?
And if he thought a busted heart and a rough time recovering from a quintuple bypass would be enough to divert this recalcitrant old guitar player from his walk with the Lord… well, he just doesn’t know me. From very early in life it seemed obvious to me that the Good Lord protects and guides those who truly believe. God did in this instance and in every subsequent misfortune I was to suffer since. The devil just doesn’t want to let up, but in the end, he fails. Not the greatest batting average, all told.
So sorry about your luck, devil. I’ve read the back of The Book, and as tempting as you can be, I would never trade my humble lot in life for yours. So bugger off!
• What I’ve been up to on my 5-year retreat from the world
Navigation: Intro | 1 | 2 | To be continued in Part 3
