Aging and diving 4.

To continue from last weeks article: It is Jan. 27, 2014 and for the past couple of weeks I had been having a muscle cramp on the left side of my chest. The laptop that I had in my backpack was heavy compared to what we have now and I always carried it slung over my left shoulder so I thought I had a pulled muscle because it only hurt when I carried my backpack, this was also at the time when the National Weather Service in Tallahassee was saying we were going to have an ice storm overnight.
I got an email from the Wakulla County Sheriff’s Office Reserves for us to go and get our patrol cars gassed up so we could make our way out to any traffic hotspots the next morning. I had my wife take me to where our cars were parked and my battery was dead, so I hooked up the jumper cables to it to try to start it. I started getting a cramping pain but this time it was worse. It did subside and my car finally started. My wife wanted to know why I was rubbing my chest, I told her it was just a pulled muscle, she didn’t buy it.
She said we should go to the fire station on Trice to have them check me out but in typical male fashion I assured her it was OK. I did promise her that I would go to my doctor the next afternoon because if it did ice up it would be gone by then. We didn’t have and ice storm so we went to see my doctor. I explained what had been going on and they hooked me up to the EKG and found nothing wrong but they sent me to the ER at TMH immediately to have more tests to rule out the heart. After being there for hours the doctor came back and said they could not find anything wrong with my heart and that it could be just a pulled muscle.
They were getting ready to send me home and then the cardiologist came to see me. He said that all seems good but when I told him I was getting sick to my stomach he then asked if I ever had a heart catheter test done before and I said no. He said I will get one the next morning and that I was staying overnight. The next morning they took me to the cath lab and put me on the table, the doctor gave me a cocktail of drugs so I literally felt nothing. I did see on the monitor how he threaded the probe into the entrance of my heart. When he released the dye that is when it hit hard, I couldn’t breathe and it felt like I was going to die. He immediately stopped and had the nurse put a couple of nitro pills under my tongue – talk about a rush. The doctor told me know that four arteries where completely blocked and the fifth one was 98% blocked.
So the next morning they performed bypass surgery. It was about a 9-hour operation and I woke up in the ICU my hands strapped to the side rails of the bed with a breathing tube the size of a fire hose down my throat, needless to say there is a reason they tie your hands to the railing of the bed. My wife was right next to me assuring me it was alright.They released me from the hospital after 10 days. Then I began my two month recovery process. The good news was I didn’t have a heart attack and the surgeon said my heart had no fat on it and it looked like a 35-year-old’s heart in a 57 year old man. When I saw my cardiology doctor he assured me I could do everything that I was doing before the surgery and after 9 months he signed off on my waiver to keep on instructing scuba diving.
On my 5 year checkup things looked great. So it’s been a little over 10 years and I’m still teaching strong. There was a big surprise for me in 2018. So stay tuned. Until then, keep making bubbles

Russell Miller #59999