- Thread starter
- #241
Blue-Jay
Garden Master
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2013
- Messages
- 3,370
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- Location
- Woodstock, Illinois Zone 5
No I haven't planted any beans yet. So I might as well let the cat out of the bag so you can see him in full living color. My beans (41 varieties of pole types) will be planted in Stanwood, Iowa probably on May 25th. I have 6 lima varieties will be grown in Albion, Inidana probably soon. I will purchase the entire resulting crops of beans from these grow outs.
So here comes the cat and his meow. I had open heart surgery on April 22nd this year. I spent 5 days in the hospital and 8 days in a rehab center here in Woodstock, Illinois. I have been home two weeks this coming Monday. I will have home care people coming each week. My Cardiologist currently has be doing 5 minutes of walking every hour. I use a Spirometer to excercise the lungs through out the day. I can walk out to the mailbox without a walker. Everybody tells I am progressing faster than most people my age that has this procedure done. This will be a year of recovery no gardens for me until 2025.
Now for the procedure. I was diagnosed with a heart murmur back as far as 2016. That means a heart valve that won't close all the way allowing blood to back flow from the chamber it was supposed to be pumping it to. I had a number of presurgical procedures. A TEE procedure discovered that my Mitral valve was severely leaking. The Mitral valve separates the upper and lower chambers of the heart on the left side. They put a ultrasound device down my esophagus to take a look at how the heart and it's valves were working. I was under sedation for this procedure of course. Another presurgical procedure called a Heart Catheter was done and they discovered that one of my arteries in my heart had an 80% blockage. Must have come from all those yummy cheese burgers and french fries over the years. In the Heart Catheter procedure they enter your artery in either your left or right wrist with a thin electronic wire with a device on the end to run that up through your artery to probe around your heart and this is when they discovered the artery blockage. So I was under sedation of course for that also. I had a number of blood tests done before surgery and a lung function procedure to see if I was fit enough to undergo open heart surgery. The Mitral valve was repaired. I'm glad it was repaired and not replaced. The repair jobs are better that a new valve. They took vein material from my upper part of my body to do one single bypass. They open you up at your chest by cutting through your breast bone and have device that keeps your ribs spread open enough to work on your heart. The lungs were collapsed and my heart stopped and I was put on a blood circulating machine during the 6 hour procedure. Putting me back together they wired my Sternum closed so the bone can grow back together.
This coming Monday I will be 4 weeks out from my surgical date. I'm just going to be doing excercises to get the heart rate up to strengthen the heart as it heals. I'm doing walking to gain endurance and to keep blood clots from forming and that also helps promote deep breathing for the lungs. I'm not allowed to drive yet or reach for anything over the top of my head so as not to put pressure on the breast bone as it heals. I will have restrictions removed from time to time. By fall of this year I won't know that I had anything done to me except for the scar on my chest. A small price to pay for the continued gift of life.
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