A Sixty-Something Woman With Coronary Artery Disease

 I'm feeling good these days, but I've had a seriously troublesome complication from my heart surgery that pretty much wiped out my productivity for the past six weeks. I have Dressler's syndrome and had to have surgery to have a catheter installed to drain the fluid buildup around my left lung. It took a trip in an ambulance and two additional hospital admissions before we got on the catheter idea, and it has been a big help. I'd hoped to only need it for a few weeks, but when my cardiologist tried to step down the amount of Prednisone I was taking, I had a setback, so I'm guessing it will be at least another month. In the grand scheme of things it's not a huge deal, but it's a pretty good example of why avoiding heart surgery in the first place is an excellent plan.  I've only had one metabolic panel done since I started trying to eliminate the oil in earnest. On 10/18, my totally cholesterol was 90! My goal is 150, so that number is truly remarkable. ...

I have a friend who is savvy about health and has given me good advice in the past about various conditions my husband and I have struggled with, so when I recently received a note from her saying, "I'm curious about why you chose Esselstyn's diet - it's so extreme," I took her question seriously. The simple answer to this question is that I'm on this diet because Dr. Esselstyn's research, which is backed up by an incredible amount of data from other studies, has shown remarkable results reversing heart disease with a whole-food, plant-based diet, and that's exactly what I want.  The discovery that I had 100% blockage in one of my coronary arteries came as quite a surprise, since I honestly thought my vegan diet would protect me from any such outcome. I knew that my cholesterol level was at the high end of the the "normal" range (my total cholesterol was 191 when I first started seeking treatment for my angina), and this concerned me, but I d...

Been home since Monday. It’s Thursday now, and I think I may finally have an effective strategy for handling the pain meds. Yesterday I received a visit from a home health nurse who is the first person who ever suggested that I might be able to manage my reaction to the opioids by taking them with food. She also suggested that I try taking half a dose if I was still skeptical (I was). I did that last night, this morning and mid-day today and it worked like a charm. I have a no-salt rice cake (sounds awful, I know, but they’re good with strawberry jam on them) that I can eat along with 1/2 a Tramadol and feel no nausea or dizziness. What a breakthrough! Speaking of the visiting nurse, it was a strange experience to have someone introduce herself to me on my doorstep, step inside and immediately ask me to stand on the scale she carried in with her. It was a challenge to my natural stand-off-ishness, but I’m glad I got over myself. Not everything she said was useful, but she really did he...

 Fingers crossed. My stupid intolerance for codeine (it makes me nauseous) could possibly interfere with going home today. I can tolerate the codeine as long as I take an anti-nausea drug along with it, but the anti-nausea medication interferes with heart rhythms, and so they won’t send that home with me. And I do still need the pain meds. I still have a bit of fluid in my lungs, and as long as I have pain, I’m not breathing fully, and the lung congestion could get worse. So I just took the new painkiller, Tramadol, and if I manage not to get nauseous, I can go home. The one downside is that I can’t take alcohol with it. I was really looking forward to a glass of wine.  My first piece of advice is about the painkillers. For reasons that should be clear from the above, I don’t like them. But , after surgery, you really need them. The very odd thing is that the nurses keep asking me IF I want them. In fact, they ask me every 4 or 5 hours if I want the Tylenol ( the correct answe...

Surgery on Thursday, knitting on Friday. All good. Then Saturday happened. Either I had a bad angina attack, or I had heartburn. Or both. Either way, I felt pretty bad Saturday morning and got bumped back over to the ICU. By Sunday morning (today), I felt much better, thank heavens. I have managed to do a bit of knitting today on a super simple headband pattern called Twist Engelsk by Rilleruth. And Libby and I listened to a short story on Audible, which felt comforting. She made me a chickpea ragout and brought it hot to the hospital, but I couldn’t eat a lot of it. It tasted good to me when I made it last week. Then I “cheated” tonight by having some avocado spread on a Jimmy Johns veggie sandwich. I seriously doubt that bread is 100% whole wheat. It tasted pretty good, though, and it was certainly better than virtually anything on the UH menu. This morning, I asked for oatmeal with dried fruit. It came with no fruit and two pats of butter. Thankfully they were served on the side. I ...

Surgery was yesterday and boy am I glad that’s over. Totally worth avoiding! Even a mini bypass is kind of a big deal. That said, it’s 24 hours post-op, and I feel pretty good. The chest tube is out and the only thing that’s still troublesome is the incision. I’ll probably be here at UH until Monday, and then a few weeks of taking it easy.  My only complaint about the hospital is that the vegan offerings on the menu are ridiculously scarce. Speaking of diet, that’s what I really want to talk about. It’s been definitively shown that a whole food, plant-based diet will drastically reduce the incidence of coronary artery disease and reverse its effects in people who already have it. So why don’t more people know this? I think there are two primary reasons. One is that our medical complex is much more focused on fixing things than preventing them. The second is that the vegan industry needs a much bigger advertising budget. Here are my new rules to eat by: * As many vegetables, whole ...

 I’m at the car wash on my way home from a pre-operative appointment at University Hospitals. I’m having minimally invasive bypass surgery the day after tomorrow. I’m 67 years old and up until a month ago, had no idea that I had any kind of heart related health issues. I’ve been eating vegan since December 2018. I guess I really thought that was going to make me invincible. Unbelievably, to me at least, I have a 100% blockage in the left descending coronary artery. I’ve recently learned that the body develops, over time, new pathways (blood vessels) to make up for blockages. The fact that I’m not dead suggests that I’ve had this for a while. My only symptom was angina. It wasn’t severe, but it was persistent. It started about 5 months ago.  I’d get one or more episodes every time I took our two Airedales for a walk.  So now I’m prepping for surgery. It’s surreal. Except for the angina, I feel perfectly healthy. And at the same time, I know I’m lucky to be alive....