Heart of my heart

The cover story of February's edition of National Geographic is titled "Healing The Heart." It's appropriate for February, when stylized hearts are everywhere, though I don't think those hearts look as much like hearts as they do the Mound of Venus (if you don't know where that is on a woman's body, the part that looks like a heart really does. It should be obvious to you, if she lets you look at her while she's nude).

The real heart weighs a little over half a pound and pumps a gallon and a half of your blood through your 60,000 miles of arteries. That's two hundred trips from our house in the East Bay to Shmeen and Shman's house in Los Angeles. The arteries that feed the heart look a little like the Mississippi Delta, branching into smaller and smaller arteries. When one of these arteries gets totally blocked, that's when a heart attack happens. The part of the muscle fed by that artery doesn't get oxygen, seizes up, and dies. If too much of the heart goes without oxygen for too long, it won't recover from the damage.

This is an angiogram of Zirpu's heart before he received a stent to open the left anterior descending artery, which serves 40% of the heart with oxygen. If it's not clear, the point of blockage is circled.


The next picture is of the same artery after the stent was inserted. The doctor sends a small tube of tiny chicken wire wrapped around a balloon on the end of a wire through the femoral artery at the groin. When it gets to the right place, she or he inflates the balloon when the stent is in place. Then the balloon is deflated and the balloon and wire are pulled out of the body. These days, they do 5,000 of these procedures at the Kaiser in San Francisco every year, so I felt pretty comfortable that they were going to take care of my husband. Imagine being the first person to agree to this treatment!


I didn't see either of these pictures until after the procedure, of course, and when I saw the "before" picture - which, you have to realize, was after the stent had been put in - I got really scared in retrospect.