Hospital - Again

It didn't take too long after all before I got the call for my angiogram after the discovery of the bicuspid systemic murmur. I got a phone call on Wednesday from the Mater hospital to say they'd got extra funding and were able to perform angiograms again. They said they had a spot in the Mater Private and asked if I was interested. Of course I was. Almost immediately afterwards I got another phone call to say I was scheduled for 6:45 this morning.

I'd gone through the whole registration process and was been taken to the pre-op waiting room when my phone rang again. It was the Surgical Day Ward in the Mater Public, wondering where I was. I made it clear that I'd been told to report to the private hospital, but they insisted that I wasn't supposed to be there. So off I went to the other place and went through the whole registration process again. It wasn't long before a junior doctor turned up to read my my rights and get me to sign a release form, and not long after that I was whisked down to the Cardiovascular Recovery Room for yet more registration and then finally in to another room for the actual angiogram.

When it was over I was told that three out of four of the bypass bits were clear, while the other one was somewhat narrowed, but not sufficiently to justify having a stent fitted. That was the good news. They'd also done what checking they could about the murmur and noticed narrowing here also. It will take another test with a scope down the throat to establish how serious this is. Depending on the result of that test, I may have to go for surgery again.

Recovery time afterwards was much longer than expected, first in the Cardiac Recovery room and then back in the surgical day ward. The nurses were wonderful, regularly checking blood pressure and temperature and making sure the wound from the angiogram procedure was behaving okay. It was a good while, though, before I was allowed to half sit up and was given some tea and toast. I'd been told originally that somebody should come in to collect me around 12 noon, but it was actually 2:00pm before I was allowed to get out of bed and get dressed. And then I had to wait for another hour for the doctor to show up to give me 'the talk'.

He began by repeating what I'd been told earlier, but clearly gave the impression that surgery was more likely than not, and that this would involve having a replacement valve fitted in the heart. He couldn't say when the scope thing would happen, but he said I would most likely be put on the list as an urgent case, so it could be sooner rather than later. The scope will pinpoint where on an arbitrary scale my situation falls. If it's at the wrong end of the scale, surgery will happen. As a parting shot the doctor said he'd have a quick listen with the stethoscope. He didn't react at all on the left side of the chest, but as soon as he turned to the right side he immediately came out with a rather unprofessional 'Jesus!' and said he could clearly hear the valve doing things it shouldn't be doing. So surgery then became a case of when rather than if.

Strangely, I was quite upbeat when I left the hospital, I guess because at least now I'm close to establishing once and for all what's causing the shortness of breath and having a solution made available to me. Now my only concern is that the surgery doesn't interfere with our holiday plans for October.