State of the Heart by Haider Warraich

Author:Haider Warraich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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I met my friend Sajjad right after I had started research in Boston after graduating from medical school. He was a cardiac surgeon and one of the mildest-mannered people I knew. He was a keen observer and liked nothing better than to be a fly on the wall, far from the spotlight but always within earshot. I felt like I didn’t really know him until one day I saw him in the operating room cut open someone’s breastbone with a serrated electric saw. The violent sound of the saw cracking through the person’s chest filled the entire room. He was staring right at the patient’s bone splitting open, knowing full well that the slightest waver could send the saw straight into the patient’s heart beating just underneath.

As he cut the patient open right down the middle, Sajjad wasn’t about to start some rare, esoteric procedure—he was only performing one of the most commonly performed surgeries in the world.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions more around the world, undergo coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. This surgery goes by many names, including bypass surgery, heart bypass, and open-heart surgery, but to those who have to say its name every day, it’s simply called “cabbage.” Many famous people over time have had this surgery performed. On the last episode of his TV show Larry King Live, Larry King told his guest, Bill Clinton, “We’re both in the zipper club.” Clinton laughed loudly, but several minutes later, King was asked by the “suits” to clarify what he’d meant by the “zipper club”—they had both had CABG surgery—after which “they have to zip you up again.” This unfortunate double entendre notwithstanding, CABG is one of the most well-known operations a human being can undergo, and perhaps no one has spoken more loquaciously about being “cracked open like a lobster” than David Letterman.

Heart disease was not a stranger who happened upon Letterman in a dark alley on a rainy night. Heart disease first visited his home decades ago, taking Letterman’s dad away for good suddenly when he was still in his fifties. Only five weeks after his surgery, Letterman hosted his first show back and told the audience, “After everything I have been through, I am just happy to be wearing clothing that opens in the front.”

Letterman was in as good health as you could imagine and ran six miles at a stretch without issues the day before he had a cardiac catheterization performed on January 14, 2000. As the images of his coronary arteries started to show up on the screens next to him, he told the audience, “In my left main artery, [there was] a hand grenade.”

His first guest, Regis Philbin, asked, “Were you shocked when they said you have to have a quintuple [bypass], and did they give you time to think about it or did they just strap you down and do it?”

“I had one of these [coronary] angiograms two years ago, and I was lucky, and they said everything is fine, keep an eye on it.

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