You have to shave my what?

The Heart Catheterization took place in a special lab at the Cardio Clinic. I was admitted and had to wait my turn. So there I was lying in a bed, wearing a Johnny Shirt and trying to pretend this was all a bad dream when the nurse came to chat. It wasn’t long before she produced a razor and proceeded to shave my groin. This was shaping up to be a bad day.

Bless her heart though; she also gave me a mild sedative.

In a very relaxed state I was wheeled into the lab. It looked like the bridge of the Star Ship Enterprise only more so. There was a team of doctors, nurses and technicians clustered around the monitors. I was given a shot of painkiller to numb the area around my groin and could feel some work being done there but couldn’t really see anything but a huge television monitor.

What they were doing was placing a little tube into the artery in my leg. Through that tube they fed a catheter along the vein and up into my heart.

Periodically they would inject dye through the catheter to illuminate the path of the blood flow. That first burst of dye was the most amazing sensation I have ever felt.

Being fully conscious I could watch the monitor and the progress of the dye through my veins. Every now and then they would stop and discuss what they were looking at in hushed voices.

The whole experience was surreal. It made me think of the descriptions one hears from people who claim to have experienced alien abductions. They describe shadowy labs and shadowy figures with strange instruments. It was all very dream-like.

Hmmm, maybe I wasn’t as fully conscious as I think I was.

The whole point of the Cardiac Catheterization is to allow the physician to see the coronary arteries and examine the function of the heart and the heart valves. The surgeon can then plan his treatment based upon what he sees.

I came out of the lab to a recovery room. A doctor stood there chatting with me while applying pressure to my groin in order to stop the bleeding from the artery. That took about ten minutes and then a dressing was applied.

After another twenty minutes I was taken by ambulance to another hospital across town to recover for six more hours before being allowed to go home.

During the six hours after a Cardiac Catheterization you cannot move around at all. The heart must not be stressed and the wound where the catheter was inserted has to have a chance to heal.

The worst part of that was; I had to pee about three hours into it. My choices were to hold it until I could move around or another type of catheter. I chose to hold it.