About Me (In My Own Words)
Just beginning my journey. I guess we call this the initial research phase. Being 65 years young, 66 next week, this is all so mind boggling.
It all started one day when I went to a minute clinic at a local CVS pharmacy To get checked out for a head cold. Very nice lady there, not sure if she was an LPN, an RN, or a PA, but she was doing the initial stethoscope checking of my chest and she looked at me and said, “you know you have aortic stenosis, don’t you?” I looked at her and said, of course not, I don’t even know what that is. Then she said “ you better be making an appointment soon with your general practitioner and have him look into this”.
It’s funny that he never caught it previous to my visit to the minute clinic. I went for 6 month checkups continuously. He suggested that I find myself a heart doctor and get it checked out. Of course his office referred me to one. Luckily locatedin the same building, there was a heart section there and my initial visit was scheduled. I’m guessing that was probably three to 4 years ago. I did the initial tests, ekg, stress, pictures of my heart, etc…. Never getting dizzy, and I passed with flying colors the nurses said. Results were moderate to severe calcification of the Aorta. My heart doc instructed me to go on as usual with my daily routine and if i had any other signs of symptoms to get back in to see him. Now the only symptom that I was having, and I was having this before I went into my first visit, so i didn’t even know that it was a symptom of anything. I had no clue it was related, if I overexerted myself for five or 10 minutes I would get dizzy so with that I would just lie down until the dizziness, went away, get back up and start exerting myself again, lie down, waited for it to go away get back up and start to exert myself again, etc…..until the job is done. No other signs of any kind were ever present.
(More to come)
So after a loooooooong winters nap, with no more signs than before, I thought to myself, self, maybe you should look into this and have another round of test done to see if there’s been any progression. So i did, and there wasn’t, at least nothing to write home about. My Cardiologist was present when I was finishing up the test, she looked them all over and said that they didn’t look that bad. She didn’t come across as being overly concerned and suggested that maybe I wait for more symptoms to appear. The results were moderate to severe, so I thought why wait to the last minute, just get this taken care of now. She agreed with me and said that she would get a referral to the surgeons office for me at the main hospital building a few miles away. A couple weeks later I went in to meet a surgeon, I didn’t pick him, he was assigned or next in line. He was a young guy, 40 years of age that expressed that he had plenty of experience in the heart operations field, but, his speech was focused all on open heart surgery. I had to ask him about The less invasive technique of OHS, and then even TAVR. It’s just felt like he preferred to do OHS, and emphasized the greater possibility of “stroke” due to the chance of calcium breaking off and traveling to the brain. He really had my wife scared because she knew that I am leaning more to TAVR.
He seemed to have an attitude, and that was a big turn off for me. Since my local hospitals here in Ft Myers, Fl don’t seem to be listed anywhere for Top Notch heart care, i will be traveling to acquire one that is. But how does one pin down the right surgeon? Relying on previous patients reviews seems to be the first step to finding the right surgeon and their team.
More Info About Me & My Heart
More About Me
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I am from:
Ft Myers, FL, FL
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I was diagnosed with:
Aortic Stenosis
