Roxanne K. Cottell

"Like 20 people standing on my chest..."

Saturday, December 20, 2008...

No one knows when lightning will strike. In this case, the lightning of which I speak was a heart attack suffered by my husband, John, the Saturday before Christmas, 2008.

Understand, men, that there are certain times in life when you are sick and need to stay in bed, and then there are times when you are too sick to stay in bed and must ...MUST go to the ER. In John's case, he was lucky - I came back to the place where he was staying at the time, just in time to find him in a cold sweat, gray in color and shaking like a leaf. While I was gone he had suffered a massive heart attack. From what the cardiologist told us, most times a heart attack will either affect the left side or the right side of the heart. In John's case, he'd suffered a whole-heart heart attack. Medically, it is known as myocardial infarction.

Stress is a big factor in heart disease, as is diet, family history and lifestyle. The combined dangers for him were that his grandfather had heart disease and his father has it. John and his grandfather share more than only hereditary heart disease. They are both part of the "Zipper Club." The Zipper Club is a term used classifying people who have had heart bypass surgery performed on them. In John's case, he had 4 arteries which were all better than 50% blocked, with two of them being 100% blocked. It was either have quadruple bypass surgery done as soon as a surgeon was available to perform the task, or go home and risk losing his life.

He chose to live.

The day after Christmas was when those staffed at the hospital were able to save his life, but ultimately, the choice was his. Would he go through the procedure and deal with the pain of recovery, or would he have just shrugged his shoulders and left the hospital, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, caution to the wind and God laughing at him? He jokingly asked the attending ER physician if he would be able to go and have a smoke, to which the doctor only laughed and then was serious when he said "You smoke. You WILL die, almost immediately, Sir."

The operation took a few hours, and when it was done, there was this man who I married who was no longer this tough guy, at least not in the manner in which he had always thought of himself as being. Instead, he had acted on love alone, knowing that the three children and I would live to wonder what would have happened had he not made this choice to live. There he lie, strapped to a bed, tubes down his throat, marks and tears where the surgeons opened up his chest and sewed in knew hope. He was anything but happy, and as he lay there, in pain and in tears and wondering if it were all worth the crap that he had to go through. It was four days in the CCU, and one day in the regular hospital Coronary Care Ward.

We thought that the pain of recovery would be simple physical pain. We were wrong.

John was released from the hospital on New Year's Eve. He was prescribed required heart medications that no one on Medi-Cal can afford, sent home and told to take simple Tylenol for aches and pains that most folks would rather have been shot dead over instead of just told to deal with. He was told that his primary care physician would have to follow their regimen of meds instead of the regimen he has been on for years, with respect to the high blood pressure medications that the PCP prescribed for him. We wondered what kind of people would send home an economically disadvantaged white man in his 40's with MEci-Cal and a prescription for overpriced medications (Plavix) that are required for his survival.

Then we wondered what kind of people would send home this same man whose ribs were all crushed, bruised and broken, equilibrium off balance and world turned upside-down without a simple prescription for pain medication, and again, on a day before a national holiday, when no private pharmacies would be open and available to dispense his needed meds?

We were told by one of the doctors at the hospital that the reason they had admitted him to the hospital was because he was at risk for another heart attack, and since it was that their doctors found the proteins in his blood told them that he was at great risk for another one, they were required to keep him there, fix his problem, and then send him on his way.

What kind of crap is that?

Big business, that's what kind.

We are tired of this sort of treatment, and now it will become his battle twofold to fight. It will become his fight to stand for the regular guy, the guy without medical insurance, the guy who has state provided insurance, and the guy who does not understand his own rights.