I'm taking a moment out from the usual hurly burly about the world at large to write about some really bad personal news. On Saturday, my older brother suffered a heart attack. He is only 44 years old.
With the greatest of fortunes with him, his wife was with him when it happened (maybe there is a use for women after all!). She called for help and paramedics got there in 9 minutes. They initally took him to a nearby hospital, but that facility did not have a heart cath lab. Ergo, they flagged a Life Flight helicopter to whisk him to a hospital on the west side of Houston that did have one.
A nurse who saw him come in told me that he was blue and purple in the face when he came in. What happened was that his main artery was 100 percent blocked. They put a stint into him and that helped. An EKG was performed later and revealed no brain damage. When I went to go see him last night, he looked at me and instantly recognized me. Though he is restrained, I reached for his hand and he shook it.
I looked at his charts when I arrived. They had him on Atropine, Lidocaine, and Diprivan. His weight was 124 kg. (273 lbs) when they brought him in.
In my deepest nightmares, I was always worried that something like this would happen to my Brother. He came back to Houston circa 1986 from graduate school and a short stint of military service, only to balloon up considerably in weight over the next 4 years or so. I recall that he once wrote a letter home where he boasted that he had finished an Army 2 mile time running trial in 12 minutes and 7 seconds and that he weighed 168 lbs. He told me to watch it, in reference to the fact that I was a cross country runner. I only said something once to him about his weight, to which he replied that he was a happy man. The only thing I could do was let him dig his own grave, to which he nearly did.
A note to myself: Start getting yearly checkups and get on the company long term disability insurance plan ASAP!
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at March 3, 2004 10:50 PM