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I was there on the gurney after the procedure and the medical technician was called in to apply pressure for 10 minutes, to the point where I was punctured during the procedure, to ensure there was no bleeding. The med technician was a sultry young woman and I could think just remotely that this could actually be somehow exciting – at another time, in another place, perhaps in my next life. But certainly not now.
The nurse in charge in that recovery room was male and former military. He sees many people come out of these procedures each of his working days. The procedures all involve basically the same technique of snaking a catheter through your arteries and then injecting dye to to view the function of arteries in potential problem areas – heart, neck, brain, kidneys, arms and legs. This is a procedure they almost always do to get a road map of where you have heart blocks before they do cardiac by-pass surgery. The nurse asked me about my medical history and I told him briefly – the cardio surgery, the surgery on the artery in my neck gong to my brain, the stents going to my legs and the bypass tube in my leg. He added one important fact I left out -
“You were a smoker, weren’t you.”
Gandalf
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