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.Drawing, February 21, 2007.
After being evacuated from Fairbanks, I was now under observation at the intensive care unit at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. Several of the nurses kept commenting about how I had taken a “big hit”. I finally asked one of them what this meant. She said that she had been working there a number of years and this was the largest troponin level she had seen. (Troponin is a marker of cardiac muscle breakdown and cell death, and is one of the ways they test if a heart attack has occurred.) I am not sure I wanted to know this information.
After another day of recovery, young Dr. B. asked me what I would like to do next. The most likely explanation for what I had experienced was that my left arterial descending artery was permanently blocked and the surrounding heart tissue that it fed had been killed by lack of oxygen. He persuaded me to get another angiogram, just to check it out and see if perhaps something could be done. He said that he would play whatever music I wanted in the operating room. For whatever reasons, the idea of having music to listen to convinced me to try it.
Dr. B. started the angiogram procedure of trying to put a catheter into the femoral artery, but he was having trouble getting through because of the scar tissue. I asked about the music.
He asked one of the technicians in the operating room to play some music over the stereo system. John Denver began singing, “Take me Home…”, not exactly what I had in mind when I had been promised music. The technicians began to converse: “Didn’t John Denver die in an airplane crash?” the first one said.
This was not an auspicious start to the operation.
