My Day

So, a little background is in order. If you’ve paid attention to my Facebook posts, you know that starting in mid-Aug, I had a significant loss in speed and power while riding.  The day after Labor Day I went to the doctor, she took lots of blood for tests, and told me to get a stress echo and a colonoscopy (she may not have ordered that until after the blood tests showed anemia, I don’t remember).  I got the stress echo on (I think) 28 Sep.  At the time, the Nurse Practitioner watching the EKG was ready to let me go until she noticed something two minutes into the recovery phase.  For some reason, no one called me back after the test, so I finally called and got an appointment with the cardiologist.  He was willing to write the results as a false positive due to my anemia, but given that my father has multiple stents, his parents both died of heart attacks (at ages 72 and 69), as did his brother (at age 88), I suggested that we go ahead and do the CCTA (CT angiogram) anyway as a precaution.  That test took place on 29 Oct.  On Oct 30, I got a call from the cardiologist’s office saying we needed to schedule a cardiac cath.  Since Sherry was out of town 31 Oct-6 Nov, we scheduled it for today.  It turns out, I had a 99% blockage of my circumflex artery.  I went in to Grant Hospital this morning at 9:00, the procedure was scheduled for 10:30.  1 stent later, I went to recovery at 12:00 and came home about 18:00.  I’ll take tomorrow off, but will be back at work on Wed.

Next up, I’m supposed to do cardiac rehab starting next week and I need to get all the paperwork together to send to the FAA so that I can renew my medical.  In the meantime, I have self-grounded except with an instructor, so you won’t see as many flight logs here as you have the last couple of months except maybe an IPC (instrument proficiency check, so I’ll be instrument current again when I get my medical back). 🙁

Below are the before and after pictures.