Dont Lose Heart............ !

It was the 20st of Nov 2006 when I received awful news from one of my cousins. My DAD suffered a Heart Attack. I actually went numb and didn’t know how to react. The day prior I spoke to dad over the phone and he sounded quite normal and jovial, as he always is.

I spoke to mom and she said things are normal and said that I need not come, but then I didn’t want to leave them alone at this horrible time…and decided to fly back home at the next available flight.I landed in Chennai at 7:45 AM on 21st Nov 2006.I reached Malar Hospital (Hospital of Muttiah Murlidharan’s wife), where my dad was admitted.

Thought I could share all the knowledge that I have acquired in the past two weeks with all…..

The symptoms:

As per my Dad, he didn’t feel any pain in his heart…it was just the sweating that accompanied with his left hand getting heavier. So the normal belief that an attack comes with a pain in the heart is false.

Then second day at hospital was the most horrible time of my life. My Dad got yet another attack on the second consecutive day. The doctor who was treating my dad said that it was a life threatening attack. They immediately sent me to the medical stores to get an injection by the name “Aggriblock IV”. The doctor spent around 3 hours with my dad in the ICU that day. It was a struggle but he managed to save him that day. But this period was horrible for me and my mom. I knew that I shouldn’t break down as there was no one who could be a support for me that day and I knew I had to do all by myself. I had all kinds of thoughts wandering in my mind that day and had prepared my self for the worst. But due to god’s blessings, once the life saving drug was given to my dad, he reacted positively to the medicines and started becoming stable.

After a few days the doctors advised us to perform an Angiogram and if required an angioplasty.

What actually is this angiogram and angioplasty?

Angiogram: An angiogram is an imaging test that uses x-rays to view your body’s blood vessels. Physicians often use this test to study narrow, blocked, enlarged, or malformed arteries in many parts of your body, including your brain, heart, abdomen, and legs. When the arteries are studied, the test is also called an arteriogram. If the veins are studied, it is called a venogram.
To create the x-ray images, your physician will inject a liquid, sometimes called "dye", through a thin, flexible tube, called a catheter. He or she threads the catheter into the desired artery or vein from an access point. The access point is usually in your groin but it can also be in your arm. This "dye", properly called contrast, makes the blood flowing inside the blood vessels visible on an x-ray. The contrast is later eliminated from your body through your kidneys and your urine.

Angioplasty: Angioplasty is a medical procedure in which a balloon is used to open narrowed or blocked blood vessels of the heart (coronary arteries). It is not considered to be a type of surgery.Arteries can become narrowed or blocked by deposits called plaque. Plaque is made up of fat and cholesterol that builds up on the inside of the artery walls.

If the blockage is not too severe, an angioplasty procedure can be used to open the artery. Traditional angioplasty involves the use of a balloon catheter -- a small, hollow, flexible tube that has a balloon near the end of it.

This procedure treats the condition, but does not cure the cause. Re-narrowing may occur, which may or may not require another procedure.

If the arteries are not sufficiently widened by angioplasty or the blockages are too severe to be treated by angioplasty, CABG (Coronary artery bypass graft) may be recommended.
As feared, my dad had 90% blockage in his arteries .There are actually 3 arteries that provide blood to and from the heart. One is called the left artery and the other two are called the right arteries. Dad’s had blockage in all of his three arteries and all were 90% blockage. It is believed that people with 70% blockage in their arteries would not even know about it. But the rate at which these percentage increases is very quick. So to all you lovely people, based on my experiences, please take your loved ones for a complete medical checkup so that things can be found out at an early stage and we don’t suffer later. The main cause of these blockages are cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes and the reason for my dad’s condition was diabetes as he is a diabetic for the past 20 years and insulin dependant for the past 4-5 years.

The problem with my dad’s arteries were that they were too thin to perform an angioplasty and hence the doc recommended us to take dad to the Apollo Hospital to perform a CABG (By-Pass Surgery)

So as of now we have handed over dad to the hands of the docs at Apollo Hospital, which is considered as one of the best in business in Asia. But there is another twist in the tale,as my dad has suddenly developed this cough, which according to the doc needs to be cured completely in-order to perform the surgery. His oxygen levels have also gone down to 62(normal being any value between 75-100).He is being given doses of steroids….yes…steroids to improve his oxygen level, which has worked well. Now his O2 has up to 85.

CABG(Coronary artery bypass graft) : Commonly known as by-pass surgery would be carried out on my dad. The process is a kind of grafting, where a small nerve from his leg or any other part of the body would be cut and grafted in his arteries, there by the blood in his arteries would flow through this new path.

Hope I have given you all some gyan on our Dil……………..:)

-GAG