Did you know that open-heart surgery has a stink all its own? It's a burning-blood fragrance -- a whiff of baking roadkill you'd swerve to avoid during a bike ride. Only deeper, richer -- tinged with death, and sweetness. I know because I inhaled a lifetime's worth of open-heart fumes recently, standing at the elbow of Toby Cosgrove, M.D., chairman of cardiovascular surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. He was performing a valve repair and coronary bypass on an old high-school pal of his, and he had invited me, a heart patient at his clinic, to watch. And, surprisingly, sniff. Let me remind you: Mortality stinks.
Every channel flipper has done it: You're happily sampling the emptiness, click by click, when you flash into a gory moment on the Learning Channel. That was my life last summer: from Wild On! to a close-up of bloody surgical gloves in an instant -- only for real, with my own heart in the spotlight and no remote to press. And I have to watch this program to its conclusion.
Here's the deal: I'm 5'10'', 150 pounds, 46 years old. I've been wearing 32-inch-waist jeans since college. I've had blood work done every year for the past 7, just for the sheer pleasure of acing an exam: My LDL (bad) cholesterol numbers averaged in the low 140s, my triglycerides below 160. And, until recently, those were considered Get Out of Heart Disease Free scores.
The R.N. who evaluated my last blood test wrote, "Your chemistry results look great. CAD [coronary-artery-disease] risk is under the normal range. No recommendations at this time." She confirmed what I saw in the mirror: a guy who was doing everything right. I work out at least four times a week, lifting weights, running, playing flat-out full-court basketball for an hour at a time. I've completed two marathons in the past 5 years, and pulled myself to the top of Grand Teton. I'm also an editor at the magazine you hold in your hands, so I've learned and lived as much health advice as anybody. But none of that prevented a 99 percent blockage in my heart's left anterior descending artery. And if that can happen to me, friends, it most assuredly can happen to you. Who, you?
Well, only if you're an adult American male. (Men over 45 are the most likely to be incubating the clot that will kill them.) Fifty-one percent of you guys--and that makes 60 million of you strolling around, averting your eyes from articles like this one--will discover your heart problem by having what the cardiologists chillingly call an "event." That is, a heart attack.
For an estimated 80,000 of these men, the first symptom is one not even I would miss: death. It's pure luck that I wasn't one of those surprise stiffs, with a starring role in our feature "Death by Exercise," which you'll find later in this issue. If you consider my sorry case an indictment of everything this magazine preaches, you can stop reading here. To me, it says something else: If a guy with all the right numbers, the right exercise habits, and a live-forever diet--or so I thought--is at grave risk of sudden death, then a lot of us are. It also tells me that the long line of nurses and doctors who told me I was fine, just fine, had no clue. And that should make you wonder what might be happening in your arteries right now, as well. Join me, and we'll take a look.
