Five years ago...

...my love affair with cigarettes,
candy bars, and fatty foods came to a crashing halt when I had a heart attack right before I was going to go onstage with my improv comedy group in Knoxville, TN.

I had been having pain in the upper center of my chest for moths before that fateful night but I dismissed it as indigestion. Turns out my heart was trying to shut down because my arteries were clogged. I also had all the classic signs (high blood pressure, pain in my arms when an artery shut down a year or so before my heart attack, a family history of heart disease) of having heart problems for a few years leading up to the evening of August 4th, 2004 but all the doctors who I had seen, all of whom were graduates of the ETSU school of medicine and who's names I'll gladly give you in person so you can avoid them like the plague, kept misdiagnosing my symptoms, thereby prolonging my problems and weakening my already bad heart.

That night in Knoxville I was feeling lightheaded as I walked in to the nightclub where we performed and I was also short of breath. I walked in, climbed the steps to the third floor, sat down, and began gasping for air. Next thing I knew I woke up on the floor, I was sweating buckets, gasping for air, and looking up at the people who were hovering over me. Then a few minutes later the ambulance got there and they whisked me off to the hospital where I met this guy:
That's Dr. Stephen Hoadley my cardiologist. He saved my life that night and because of that we still see each other once or twice a year. He likes to see me partially naked when we get together so I take my shirt off and I let him feel me up. Then for some crazy reason I have to pay him, instead of it being the other way around. Actually, he's a good guy and a damn fine cardiologist.

Dr. Hoadley put a stent in me five years ago tonight. But in the long run a stent was only a stop gap solution, so about a month later I had a quadruple bypass, Bill Clinton had his around the same time as I had mine. If you've ever wondered what they do to you in a bypass operation, this is what they do after they saw open your breastbone:
I had four of those. And in about 8 to 10 years I'll have to have another bypass because the bypasses don't last forever. But mine will last a quite a while because I not taken smoking back up since my heart troubles. I am five years free of cigarettes and about it's been about 12 years since I smoked marijuana. I also cut out a lot of the bad fat in my diet and I stopped eating and drinking stuff that has High Fructose Corn Syrup in it.

So, so far I've beaten the disease, with the help of my girlfriend Sparky who has been a true champion through out all my health problems and without whom I'd probably have been long gone by now, that claimed my sister, my mother, and a couple of my uncles on both sides of my family. However I've got quite a ways to go before I surpass my Uncle Bob, he had about the same thing happen to him when he was my age, even though he didn't smoke a pack and a half of Marlboro Lights a day, and he's still around today. I believe he's in his mid to late 70's so that gives me something to shoot for.

Happy anniversary to me and if you ever have pains in the upper middle of your chest, don't wait to get them checked out, go to the emergency room if you have to, just make sure you get checked out, it may just save your life.