More Surgery!

Marj and I spent our day yesterday waiting for Grandpa and his angiogram.  What three nurses told us would be about an hour was almost three hours by the time we saw him again.  We found out that the doctor had not only done an angiogram to see what was wrong, but had gone ahead and inserted another stent in an artery and checked out the rest of his heart.  The doctor assured us that Grandpa now has 5 good arteries and that everything in his heart that could be opened up had been opened up.  We were told that the electrical physiologist would monitor his heart rate for the next 24 hours to see if opening up the artery with this last stent would help the very irregular heartbeats Grandpa was having.  After that they would decide whether to give him a pacemaker, a defibrillator or just say he was fixed. 

So this morning Marj was very surprised when Grandpa called and said he was going into surgery at 11:00 am.  It ended up being in the afternoon after all, but he came out of surgery with a defibrillator, also known as an ICD.  An ICD adds extra beats if the heart rate is too low or shocks the heart if the heartbeats are too fast.  We found out that the doctor had studied Grandpa's overnight heart rate and found that his ventricular tachacardia (rapid heartbeats) had not improved.  The doctor was scheduled to be in surgery today anyway, so he decided that NOW was the time to get this done.

Grandpa was still very sedated at 4:00 pm, but hopefully he'll be better tomorrow.  The literature on ICDs says that Grandpa CANNOT play contact sports, use a jack hammer or shoot a rifle.  He is also supposed to stay away from magnets--including the MRI machine.  He was not one bit sad about that, and he told us after he had the last MRI that he would never do that again.  Grandpa CAN go through the screening process at the airport, but he will set off the machine every time.  He is to tell them NOT to use the magnetic wand on him and he has three cards to show them:  one for each of his stents and one for his ICD.  He is supposed to carry these in his wallet at all times.  So basically, Grandpa's plans for the trip to Alaska to go elk hunting, and his plans to tear out any imperfect cement in the yard will have to be abandoned, and there will be no more playing football in the back yard.

We'll see what surprises tomorrow brings.