Thanks go out to my daughter Brooklyn for guest hosting and updating everyone yesterday about my procedure. And thanks to ya’ll for the well wishes, prayers, and emails. Yesterday afternoon I couldn’t stay awake any longer than 15 minutes at a time but I wasn’t in any pain. Today is a different story. Not only is my throat killing me but my tongue hurts really bad. So I looked in the mirror and my tongue is BLACK! I’m not a Chow so I shouldn’t have a black tongue. All I can figure is that they sprayed some sort of antibiotic down my throat before they went in. That’s how they saw my heart yesterday you know, through my throat. They probably passed a cheeseburger or two on the way down to the heart also. It’s a good thing I prepared for this by making a ton of jello on Thursday night.

So to recap yesterday, I got up bright and early as we had to be at the hospital by 7:30. It was not the normal heart hospital that I go to, but a larger one way over on 86th street. I couldn’t eat or drink anything after midnight of the night before so I had to content myself with smelling the G-man’s coffee. Oh yes I did! I stuck my honker right in his full coffee cup and took several big whiffs. I am so addicted to coffee. The half-wit scheduler at my cardiologists office told me to go to the 4th floor of St. Vincent’s hospital for this procedure. I had to be there by 7:30 so they could prep me for the procedure and the anesthetic. I was to be put out completely. I get there and wait and wait and wait some more. About 8:15 they finally call me back. The woman puts me in a room and tells me she is going to be administering the procedure and I will be partially awake for it. Oh hell no! So I told her “No, I’ll be put completely under.” “No” she said “You will be awake and alert, just relaxed from the medication I give you”. “No” I said again, “I’ll be getting full anesthesia and will be completely out.” We went back and forth like this for several minutes. Finally I said “well I’m not going to have this done then because my doctor told me that because of the morphine I was on he would have to have the anesthesiologist put me out. So if I can’t be put out completely I am just going home.” She said that since I was on morphine the relaxing medicine she would be giving me wouldn’t even work and I would be fully awake. She said “Let me call you doctor and see what is going on.” She called him and he chewed her out. Seems that he and the anesthesiologist had been waiting for me for 45 minutes! She was all apologies after that.

So she walks me to the section of the hospital that I need to go. But first we stopped by the waiting room to get the G-man. He is not there! I see a bathroom down the hall and I knock on the door. No one responds. So the gal tells me to poke my head in and call his name. I do and the G-man says “I’m busy”. So I holler for him to hurry up and come on out that we are in the wrong part of the hospital. This gal and I stand there by the bathroom door and wait and wait. No G-man. She looks at me and says “did he take a magazine with him?” Shortly another nurse walks by and asks why we are waiting in front of the mens room. The other nurse tells her. Then she asks “He didn’t take a magazine in there with him did he?” Finally he comes out and guess what he had under his arm? Yup, a magazine. We should have just left him there. So the nurses start teasing him “Did you get all your paperwork done?” I have never seen him turn so red in my life.

Brooklyn filled you in basically on what is going on. I need open heart surgery to place a defective valve that was defective since birth. They want to wait as long as they can before they replace it. My doc used the “tomato” analogy. He said you wouldn’t want to pick a tomato when it was green. (I would because I love fried green tomatoes) And he said you wouldn’t wan to wait to pick it until it was overripe. You want to pick it when it is just ready and perfect. The same goes for replacing your mitral valve. The full heart scan in Wednesday shows how bad the kink in the garden hose is. (The coartation of the aortic valve) but my cardiologist thinks that the heart surgeon would put a stint in it after clearing the artery and not go for the open heart surgery at this time. He thinks I have at least 6 months and even possibly up to a year before I will need to have the open heart surgery. In the meantime I just go about business as usual but lay off the bacon sandwiches (drat). Guess I’ll just have to settle for the waffle with strawberries that I had for breakfast this morning.