DH drove me to my angiogram yesterday (2.5 hours each way). We got back home at 9 PM after spending a few hours of recovery in a hospital room. We were both exhausted.
Conclusion
• 40% mid LAD stenosis, otherwise normal coronary arteries. The LAD is the Left Anterior Descending coronary artery. When blocked, it’s famous for the “widowmaker” heart attack but the doctor said my stenosis is age-normal and not something to worry about. All my other coronary arteries are clear. That’s very good news!
Open-heart surgery scheduled Nov. 19 to replace aortic valve and aortic aneurysm.
I’ll stop typing because I have pain and bruising in the wrist where they threaded the catheter.
Wendy
Hope you’re feeling better after your angiogram. I can understand why your cardiologist wasn’t everso excited about your degree of blockage. He’s probably more used to seeing this sort of thing…
This arrived in my email on a Sunday evening after my CT angiogram on Friday…wirh appointment with the cardiologist scheduled for the Thursday. I remember wondering if the results would be ready for him. It was such a shock to see the degree of blockage and reduction in functional flow, I thought that either I was looking at multiple stent placements or my results had been mixed up with someone else’s as I couldn’t understand why I had no symptoms even with high intensity exercise. Well, it turns out that the reason I have no symptoms on exercise is because I actually exercise…a lot…in volume and intensity.
The cardiologist actually called Monday evening as he imagined I… and especially my husband…would be alarmed. He agreed with me that sending these sort of results directly to the patient to receive without interaction with the physician responsible for ordering first does not promote health and well-being.
Anyway he gave a decent over the phone tutorial on development of microcirculations in CAD…even longer explanation on the Thursday. It seems that, as recently as a decade ago, stent placement was seen as a good thing even in asymptomatic cases of stenosis as severe as mine (and possibly even your “trace” amount) Nowadays, it’s pretty much the opposite, given the introduction of lipid lowering meds that can get LDL-C down to levels that actually produce a regression of the atherosclerotic plaques
The cardiologist prescribed a statin but I had a bad reaction to it. (Pain in hip and knee.) Since my coronary arteries are clear and Lp(a) is low I think I will decline the offer of a statin.
So glad to hear that exercise worked for you. My docs stated that only reason I wasn’t dead or just heart attack was because of the peripheral blood flow I had. Direct result of working through stuff during exercise before the blockage became complete.
It was only when completely blocked that I started to get such extreme symptoms.
There we go, two results means it’s real right? LOL.
It is worth considering briefly trying different statins to see if one works for you. The protection is worthwhile if you can tolerate one of them well.
I can offer a third with Sis’ 100% blocked circumflex artery. She went in when her symptoms got too bad to ignore. Regular exercise had developed peripherals. They put a stint in, during which she had a heart attack, but is now doing well. The stint placement was more complex than expected, and she had to travel to Boston to get a surgeon who would do it. Doctors in GA refused to touch it. LAD 30% blocked but they are treating that medically. Exercise certainly helped her.
Well, although I’m confident that the lifestyle I’ve led…both exercise and diet etc…certainly mitigated the genetic predisposition towards severe ASCVD, I’m equally confident that it’s been a double edged sword. I’m sure that both my CAD and Wendy’s aortic stenosis were discovered late in the disease process because, along with our social history we both demonstrated the physical appearance of a Good Custodian of their body.
Sufficient to fool someone who ought to have known better into lowering the index of suspicion they should otherwise have had…and probably would’ve demonstrated had either one of us waddled in the the office with 50lb or so of excess blubber, stinking of cigarettes etc.
This is true…and the relative protection might be greater post surgery when your ascending aorta and aortic valve have been switched to new/foreign materials with the inevitable local inflammatory response it creates. Even with zero evidence of atherosclerotic plaques, a low dose statin was recommended for my husband (granted, on fundamental principles rather than long term RCTs…because these procedures aren’t that commonplace and haven’t been around long term).
He developed a bit of pain in his shoulder after a couple of months. He mentioned it to the primary care doc during an interim visit who suggested switching from lipitor. He did. Made no difference but was much more expensive so he switched back to lipitor. I suggested he might just have a bad shoulder from too much sitting at the computer. Poo-pooed the idea but got a new computer chair and set up to support his mouse arm better…and lo, shoulder improved.
Not to diminish the reality that side effects from statins, although not tremendously common (considering the numbers of folks taking them) do exist, they can be reduced or eliminated with a change of medication…either another statin or alternative lipid lowering med.
