Dramatic True Story of Larry Collins Heart Attack

With this weblog I hope to share my experience with you and possibly help you in some way. At least, I hope you will find it interesting and maybe a little amusing.

I am not a professional writer and I will give little thought to sentence structure and style. I will focus on the story. I will try to be clear, most of the time, but you will see that sometimes modesty and other issues will cause me to be, well, less clear and leave things to your on imagination.

I will initially publish the first four chapters of my experience. I plan to publish one or more additional chapters each week so please check back often.

Chapter One

I have made a mistake or two that I will pay for the rest of my life. But, the good thing is, there is a “rest of my life”. I am wounded, but I enjoy every day.

I have some good friends I go with to Saturday breakfast. It is a routine thing that we hate to miss, but being a bunch of guys, you sometimes need thick skin to ward off the good natured kidding.

About a year after my nearly fatal heart attack, I was at breakfast with my friends and one of them, a farmer who is a very big man, started talking about all the stitches he has had. As he talked he explained how badly his hand had been cut on one occasion and how many stitches it took to fix it. Then he rambled on about removing the stitches himself. As might be expected, someone sarcastically told him, “You must really be tough”!

At that point I said, “Steve, when I had my heart attack, they cut my chest open, sawed my breastbone in two, spread my ribs with a pry bar, put me on a heart lung machine, and stopped my heart from beating. Then they cut into my heart and sewed a piece of Dacron fabric across a hole that, due to the heart attack, had opened up between the chambers. The hole is called a ventricular septal defect (VSD). They cut a vein out of my leg and used the vein to sew two bypasses to my heart. They could not get my heart restarted so they shocked the bajebers out of it three times before it finally fired up. Next they wired my breast bone back together and stapled my chest closed.” After telling Steve this story, every bit of which is true, I paused and gave Steve a good look in the eye and then announced, “And I am so tough, I slept right through it!”

That little joke sums up about four and a half hours of my life, but the real story is about before and after my operation. I don’t think you will be disappointed to read on…

Please click through to Larry  Collins site here CONTINUE (http://home.earthlink.net/~ltc5871/)