Hello friends,

There are a number of people who I would like to share this story/explanation with, so I thought I would be smart to deposit it in this public place, then refer to it from my online hangouts.

If you know me, you have probably heard that I am having problems with my heart. Essentially, repeated shortness of breath and a change in the sound of my long-known-about heart murmur prompted my family doctor to send me back to my cardiologist. I had a heart attack nearly 12 years ago, the week after 9/11. At that time, during a heart-cath procedure, the cardiologist placed a stent to clear a single serious blockage (it was around 80% blocked.) Problem fixed.

3-4 years later I had some sort of symptoms that sent me back. I had another heart-cath, no problems detected, and where I had been seeing the cardiologist 4 times a year since the heart attack, at that point he cleared me after an echo-cardiogram; he could find no evidence of any damage to my heart, and said that if he did not know I had a heart attack, he would not have guessed I had. In fact, things were so good, he released me on my own recognizance. “Call if you have a problem.”

So, this January, I tried to take up walking after a break, and found that I couldn’t even get started before I was completely out of breath. I chalked it up to being out of practice, but the third and fourth sessions on the treadmill didn’t get any better. In March I finally went back to the family doc, who sent me to the cardiologist. So I had a stress test and an echo-cardiogram, and the initial diagnosis was something called stenosis, which, best as I understand it, is a narrowing of a major artery or valve. I was placed on a blood thinner and went back to a baby aspirin per day until I could meet with the cardiologist.

When I saw him, he told me that in the intervening days since he had seen the test results, he believed his initial guess of stenosis was wrong. He wanted to verify it by letting his intern do a quick check. She walked in, put a stethoscope to my neck directly under my ear for about 5 seconds, turned to the cardiologist and said “Bicuspid?” He nodded. It seemed like magic to me. Bad voodoo.

It would take another cath procedure to verify it, but whereas normal people have tricuspid heart valves, we mutants have only two. And apparently they can’t just inject a third one. The heart cath was scheduled for Tuesday, 6 days later. When I started whining, trying to negotiate for putting anything off until after summer school (which saves us from bankruptcy every year), he said that I would be having open-heart surgery, and that it could possibly happen the same day as the exploratory heart-cath, depending on the condition of my heart other than the suspected bicuspid problem. So while summer school wasn’t ruled completely out, it was “very very unlikely”. The second very is the one that really bothered me.

So, two of my “radio pals” from the WFMU community, AP Mike and Therese host a show called Depravity’s Rainbow, a fill-in show for the Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling, which happens to be the best radio show in America. And Mike announced on the air that night, May 7th, that I had a “procedure” that day, and they sent me their best. I love the WFMU-Best Show-Friends-of-Tom community, but I did not know until earlier tonight that I had been mentioned, and then mentioned again when Great Human Being Jason from Alabama called to announce that a “good source” (my son, Andy from Knoxville, who promised Tom years ago that he would call up and they could duet on songs from Grease on the air, and he still needs to do that) which is part of what prompted me to write this to clear up any confusion for people nice enough to be interested in my situation. So here’s what you don’t know, and it’s mostly good.

I did have the heart cath the morning of that show. The cardiologist was frankly shocked to find virtually no damage to my heart. “Look, your cholesterol is a mess and you’re diabetic; I would have sworn we would have been cutting you open this afternoon.” I had one blockage that he characterized as “minor” (apparently the blood flow had found another way around, so even with the blockage, I had nearly 100% flow through that area.) There was a pressure differential through my aortic valve that was not at all indicated the day of my heart attack 12 years earlier, but that was probably a natural result of the aging process, and that valve was functioning in the ballpark of 75%. While that’s not perfect, some people function for months at 20% before they even become symptomatic. Since I have only 2 of the requisite 3 cusps, I figure if I’m doing better than 67%, I am ahead of the game.

So, all things considered, he’s given me the OK to teach summer school, make a little money to alleviate the costs and current debt, and schedule the surgery the first day everybody is free in late July, probably around the 25th. If everything goes as expected, I would miss the start of the fall semester, and probably return to work around the first of October.

All this to explain why the date and story keep changing; I’m afraid I sound like the boy who cried wolf-heart. But the open-chest part could have happened the day of that radio announcement; following that meeting, it could have happened as early as June the 15th, but now it will definitely happen before August 1, but not in June unless there’s a sudden unexpected problem.

I have an offer out to Tom to have a clip of the surgery videoed for inclusion in the 2014 Marathon Premium; he seems reluctant. If I can convince him, maybe many of you will get to see a side of me you never expected; the inside.