I’ll be honest. I didn’t really want a steel wire threaded up from my wrist to the inside of my heart. Abundant anxiety as my brother and I tried to find our way through the maze of hallways at Kaiser Walnut Creek. No one seemed to know where I was supposed to be for my angiogram, which didn’t instill a lot of confidence in the whole Walnut Creek operation (as opposed to my Mother Ship, Kaiser Oakland, which is somehow chaotically functional and professional). We make a joke about Igor and a basement “operating room.”
But…after 90 minutes of prep and pep talks by wonderful nurses, it took no more than 10 minutes for them to feed the catheter up my arm and into my heart, inject some dye, look around, and call it a day—all of which I endured wide awake with just a smidge of fentanyl.
“OK, we’re done. Everything looks good,” says the doctor. Good as in no heart disease. Good as in no blood clots or other blockages. Good as in no stent required. And good as in “you can go home in a few hours.”
Good as in a good day.
PS: Nurse Nancy told me that I had to be very careful with the incision where they put in the catheter so that it doesn’t start bleeding. It’s an artery, and if it were to break open, I could “bleed out in two minutes.” I guess that would qualify as a bad day.
[Good Day Sunshine, The Beatles]