On My Heart (A Series) … Here We Go Again

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A year ago next Tuesday is the anniversary of my open heart surgery to replace my leaking aortic and mitral valves. As it turned out, the surgeon made a (poor) judgment call and decided the mitral was not bad enough to replace. I say this again, not because you may have forgotten that I mentioned it several dozen times in the last few months, but because I’m bitter about it.

Or I was …

Because we could not come to a meeting of the minds, my cardiology team and I decided that our relationship had run its course and I needed to find someone new who could truly look at my heart and meet my needs.

I met my new cardiologist, we will call him Dr. Awesome, back in July. He is a breath of fresh air. After only a few minutes of speaking with him, it became obvious that he had done something no other doctor had ever done before. HE READ MY CHART. He read my chart before I arrived. He didn’t just peruse the chart, he didn’t just scan it for highlights and talking points. He knew my chart. He knew the entire chart. He knew what happened to me in 1995 to bring me into his office in 2024. He took the time to explain the difference between heart failure and valve disease. I have both. All this time I thought my heart was failing because my valves were leaking. But he said heart failure was about the pumping action of the heart. I could have heart failure without leaking valves or leaking valves without heart failure. Unfortunately, due to the cancer treatment options available to me in 1995, I had both. He did say that sometimes fixing the valves will improve the heart’s pumping function, too. We’d just have to wait and see. If it didn’t, he assured me he had a team of heart failure experts ready to take on the issue.

“In short,” he said, “I can help you.”

I told him that my other cardiologist had to go to committee and the committee declined. “When will you be speaking to your committee,” I asked.

He smiled, “I don’t have a committee. If I want to treat you, that is my decision and yours, alone. No one else.”

“I need to ask you this, first.” I said. “Are my expectations too high? Going into surgery in September, I thought I would be a new woman by July. But I’m not. I feel older now. Should I feel better, or are my expectations too high?”

“No, I don’t think your expectations are too high. I would say this to you if you were 80. Heart failure is not a fact of aging. You are in great overall health. You didn’t walk in here with an oxygen tank, driving a scooter, morbidly obese, smelling like cigarettes. You have a healthy diet and until things went south you lived an active life. You are the person I want to help. You will not take my gift and squander it. You will take care of it. I want to treat you. Do you want to be my patient?”

“Absolutely, I do!!!”

He gave me a referral to see the surgeon he works with and said he would be in the operating room with me, too.

I met the surgeon last week. He and his team had great energy. He drew out on a piece of paper what was going on in my heart then explained what he was going to do to fix it. I’m a high risk patient and they don’t want to open me up again. They will use a Mitraclip^TM to repair rather than replace the valve. The Mitraclip^TM has only been FDA approved for high risk patients. If I’m not classified “high risk” the insurance company will not pay for it. So, he classified me as high risk. I asked him why the insurance company would rather I go through open heart surgery, a ventilator, ICU and ten days in the hospital, versus this less risky procedure. “The clip is more expensive because we have to buy the technology,” he said, “and money makes people stupid.”

He explained that the clip will be inserted through an artery in my leg and guided into my heart and placed over the faulty valve. He said half the time, patients need two clips to make the repair complete so he would go into surgery prepared to do that. He leveled with me that sometimes it doesn’t work and at that point they would have to schedule a full open heart surgery again.

My surgery is scheduled for October 14. My hospital stay will be two days at most.

I’m cautiously optimistic. I’m prayerfully hopeful. I am a little scared, but not as much as I thought I would be. This is what being in good hands does for a person. My cardiologist believes I have the right to feel good and live an active lifestyle. He never once told me that getting older means slowing down and accepting what I am unable to do. My new team WANTS me to get better, I can feel it.

The best part is that I know I have options and I don’t feel like Dr. Awesome is going to give up on me like the last guy. If I wake up feeling like a new woman, which my surgeon’s PA said happens quite often, then I will be over the moon. But, if I don’t, it is not the end. I know what I want the outcome to be, but I’m not so attached to the outcome that I will fall apart if it doesn’t work out that way.

I have plans, and I know that there is a “Divine Plan of Goodness” for me. In faith, I made my garden larger for next year as I hope to have the wind to tend it. We envision Christmas time 2025 in Germany with family. I plan to WALK hand-in-hand with my Charles through our golden years, rather than be pushed in a wheelchair by him. I plan to learn things and build things and enjoy things.

A few days ago, while Charles “rested his eyes” on the couch, I walked out onto the porch and just enjoyed my place. We built this house, with this porch, for this very thing and I realized I had not allowed myself the time to slow down and do the thing I had dreamed of doing. So, I sat there for a couple of hours, admiring the flowers, birds, butterflies, bees and even that polite little squirrel that comes by for some bird seed and never knocks over the feeders.

Since that day, I have taken the time to be out there every evening. What are we doing, building the life we dreamed of, if we aren’t stopping to enjoy what we’ve built?

There is a lovely moon tonight.

I plan to enjoy many many more lovely moons.