Heads up on my day. I just got home and my phone has run out of juice. It took about two hours and twenty minutes, courtesy of the car service, local Sheepshead Bay Russians, but that’s another story. The car service ride is part of the deal. If one is willing to get cut by these doctors, they are willing to ferry you there gratis.
Today at the hospital I spoke first to Molesworth, the nickname I have for my doctor. He said that he wanted to get a closer view of everything to ascertain whether the stent procedure would work. He said that once he knew the answer to that we would then be in a position to make some decisions. The one artery is relatively clear, It was the other one that concerned him. This condition is called Carotid Stenosis. If the stent procedure was not possible, the other route involved some surgery, where he would cut into my neck and take the junk out. This was a more serious option. He had already decided that neither procedures of that nature would happen today.
But he ascertained that the stent option was extremely doable. Essentially it is the same procedure as what happened today. They go into the artery in the groin and going on today’s photographs they insert the stent. Both Molesworth and his boss agreed this could be done. Here are the next steps. Molesworth is going to share his findings with an in-house neurologist just to double check, and then get back to me in about a week’s time for us to set up doing it. He was reluctant to do any of it today because he had already done enough digging around and he said enough is enough for one day.
But it is a fairly serious wound that needs to be wrapped so I had to wait a few hours to make sure it had stopped bleeding and that all of the other numbers were normal. They were. There is no danger of some kind of stroke in the meantime because of the medication that I am on. They were both certain that as long as I remain on that regimen, the blood thinner, the statin and the aspirin, there is no likelihood of this. So, they talked about getting it fixed within the next month. I feel confident that these guys know what they are doing. I realized that the young doctor I saw on Monday was deferring to the big boppers, the experts. What he originally said wasn’t inaccurate, it was just something that he didn’t want to be the final referee on.
The car service ride was comedic in its absurdity. I volunteered to share my ride with two very nice older West Indian women, a mother and a daughter, with the promise that I would be dropped off first since my place was on the way to their place. I was assured this would happen and the old dears were fine with that. This guy then took half an hour to cross 125th Street (single lane), always a nightmare despite my barking, and then took us out over the Triboro Bridge (now the RFK Bridge) into Queens, naturally busily backed up. We passed by La Guardia Airport, passed by where the Mets play baseball, passed by the US Open tennis stadium, were almost on the highway leading into JFK Airport, caught the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Interboro Parkway, which is a dead man’s curve kind of deal in a torrential thunderstorm, to finally put as at the wrong-assed end of Eastern Parkway. He then missed the turn onto Eastern Parkway, at which time I told him I could have driven us quicker to Philadelphia. Meanwhile the Google machine he was religiously following gave up on telling him that this was the shortest route. We left 114th Street & Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan at 5:30. I got dropped off at 7:50. And the old girls still had to carry on into the Brooklyn night. This was not a time to be worrying about burst blood vessels. It’s a bit like driving to JFK via Newark. What a stroke of luck getting this imbecile. Now that’s a Hard Crackers story. How to stay healthy and avoid the trains. The luck of some people and now complaining about it to boot. Meanwhile the Russian got three fares for the price of one from the men in white coats.
Anyway, I am home. I will take tomorrow off to make sure the cut has healed up properly. All in all, it wasn’t a bad outcome, actually a good one in fact. As ever.