Word: chested
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Dear President Clinton: welcome to the confraternity of the cabbage (that's slang for "coronary artery bypass"). The first thing you've noticed is that it hurts. It feels as if someone with the best intentions has shot you in the chest. Discourage people from telling you jokes; don't laugh. Stay still; when you walk, do it carefully. When Henry Kissinger got out of bed after a bypass years ago, he remarked, "Diss vass a bitch...
There are millions who bear the marks of membership--the zipper scar down the center of the chest, another long scar worming along the inside of the leg where the tubing was stripped out to jury-rig the heart's new plumbing. (Over the years I have had two multiple-bypass operations, done in the same hospital where yours was performed. My last operation was 11 years ago. I played squash last night for an hour...
...operation is routine--300,000 performed every year. If you are the patient, however, it does not feel routine to have your chest cracked open and, after a period of pleasant blackout that seems to last an instant (and that later makes you think it's what death and eternity must be like), to come swimming back up into consciousness shaking uncontrollably from the cold. (Your body has been packed in ice for the procedure.) A coronary bypass is routine for the surgeons but memorable for the patient...
...case it picked up a problem that all his previous stress tests and electrocardiograms had missed. But an angiogram is not something to be taken lightly. It involves injecting a dye directly into the blood vessels of your heart through a catheter that has been threaded into your chest from an artery in your groin. By taking X-ray images of the dye, doctors can get a pretty clear picture of where blood is flowing freely and where there are constrictions...
...risk free. In about one case out of 1,000, according to Dr. Richard Stein, associate chairman of medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, there are complications--including, in rare cases, strokes. For patients who have never had any symptoms (such as the chest pains and shortness of breath that Clinton experienced) and whose stress tests are normal, the risks outweigh the benefits, says Stein...