BY: Frank Meyer. It was March 1999 when I had my heart attack. I was enjoying a pleasant day with some friends having lunch, playing cards, and smoking too many cigarettes. Lunch was Lasagna, a very rich one, and I had to have that second helping. It was not more than a half hour past lunch that all of a sudden a large elephant sat down on my chest. Of course there was no elephant, large or otherwise, but that is exactly what it felt like. Some of you have been there, and know exactly what I am saying, but for those of you, who have not had this experience, please don't. I intend to do everything in my power to help you to avoid having to go through these things that I had to experience before I learned that all this was really totally unnecessary, since coronary artery disease is for the most part preventable.
My friends rushed me to the hospital, where they did their best to make me comfortable with medicines, and did several tests to see how much my heart was affected. Fortunately, the damage was minimal, and after a couple of days in the hospital, my Dr. sent me home for a week more of bed rest. She also advised me to go elsewhere for an Angiogram, as this was not available in Puerto Vallarta. I made arrangements to fly to San Diego, and Scripts Clinic, where I could have the follow up that had been advised. When I arrived at the airport, a friend met me and whisked me off immediately to the hospital, where I was admitted for tests. I flunked my first one, a stress test. That meant, I would now have an angiogram.
The results of that test are the main subject of this discussion. I had three partially blocked coronary arteries. They ranged from 65% to 90% blocked. Since I had 3 arteries blocked, the doctors decided that I needed to have an immediate procedure committed on me. This procedure, the very well known By- pass surgery, was needed immediately, and it would be a quadruple bypass. I have since learned the medical staff slang term for this to be "Cabbage Surgery", or CABG, which really means Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting, and believe me you don't want it. I was scheduled to have it on Monday. This was Friday, and I would remain in the hospital until then. I had heard about the Ornish Program in the past, and now I became aware that this program was available at this facility. I asked my daughter to bring me the book "Dr Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease", I read it and learned that I didn't need to have that surgery after all. If I could completely change my lifestyle, it was possible that in time my arteries would unclog in the same manner that they had clogged in the first place. It took years for them to clog up, and it would take years for this situation to reverse. And finally, 50% of all By-Pass surgeries fail in 5 years, and have to be done a second or third time.
Monday came, and in spite of all of the medical staff's (that I had contact with) objections, plus those of my family, I opted to check out of the hospital, rather than subject my self to having that surgery committed on me. They even wrote on my chart that "I was a bomb ready to explode". I went to a friend's home to rest. One very close friend finally convinced me, to have the surgery. She even made the appointment, and then took me back to the hospital the day of the surgery. After I had healed for a few months, I started the Ornish Program there at Scripts as a rehabilitation program for me. During these months, and then during the next six months of the program, I studied everything I could find on the Internet and elsewhere on about this disease. One other man, Dr. John A. McDougall, has a similar approach to preventing and treating Heart Disease. One of his books, "The McDougall Program for a Healthy Heart", I would also recommend as essential reading,
I learned that currently 69 million Americans suffer from cardiovascular disease, more than one quarter of the population, according to the American Heart association.. One and a half million Americans will have heart attacks this year, and 500,000 of them will die. Each year diseases of the heart and blood vessels kill approximately 1 million people in the United States. When you compare this death toll to that of any other illness we face today, you realize there is no comparison. Cancer kills nearly 500,000, which is approximately one half of that of heart disease, while AIDS kills about 30,000 Americans, which is about 3% of Cardiovascular disease deaths. Heart disease is a relatively recent epidemic. Through the 19th Century, and the early part of the 20th, most people avoided heart disease. In 1900, pnuemonia and influenza were the leading killers. Heart disease was way back in number four position. But by 1930 it had become number one. There are people in the world that who don't even think about heart disease because the cholesterol levels in their blood are so low that heart disease doesn't touch them. The reason; they live on a diet of starches, vegetables and fruits.
The rich American diet--high in fat and cholesterol, deficient in dietary fiber and unbalanced in vitamins and and minerals--is responsible for most of the heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, cancer and diabetes we experience today. These illnesses are actually different manifestations of the same underlying disease. That underlying casual disease is
essentially the poisoning of the body through the consumption of excessive amounts of rich foods. Drs. Ornish and McDougall's research have shown that these diseases are indeed metabolic diseases, and result because of the poor diet we have been accustomed to following. As recent as twenty years ago, most cardiologists vehemently disagreed with these two men. The attitude then was that cardiologists said that they could not get their patients to even eat less red meat and take their medications. It wasn't till Ornish's research was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on September 20, 1995, that the attitude of the mainstream cardiologists started to slowly change. In 1999, my original cardiologist didn't advise me of the Ornish program available at the same institution that he was practicing in. Fortunately for me, I had done my homework, and had become aware of this program. It is important for each of us to take charge of our health problems. With all the information that is available to us on the internet, this has become much easier than ever before.
I became part of the Ornish Program at Scripts in September 1999. We had 18 "Cohorts", as participants were called.
Wives or husbands were encouraged to take the course along with their spouses to learn about the important lifestyle changes that would be necessary to either prevent or reverse Coronary Artery Disease. Basically, they are concerned with diet, exercise, stress management and group support meetings.
Changes in the diet is, of course, the hardest for most cohorts to cope with. The diet is vegetarian, with less than 10% fat daily. Believe it or not, there are many exciting meals that can be based on starches and vegetables rather than centered on meat. Dr. Ornish's books have many recipes in them that meet with the requirements of the program. Walking is the basic type of exercise that is recommended, with a minimum of 30 minutes at least five days a week.
This is a power walk, that will elevate your heart rate.
Stress management in the program is done with Yoga exercises, and is recommended for an hour each day at least.
They support group still meets every week for an hour, and most of my group attend every time.
I attend whenever I am in the Southern California area.
We keep in touch, and help each other solve the continuing challenge of staying healthy. I will be apart of this program for the rest of my life, and am so very thankful for the opportunity to be a part of it. It probably saved my life.
Since I first became part of this program, most insurance companies, realizing that it is cost-effective, and much less costly than the invasive procedures that they are currently paying for, and have approved it for their insures. Medicare has approved the program; first as a cardiac rehabilitation program, and now more recently, as an alternative treatment to surgical intervention. So now more than ever it is up to you to choose the type of treatment you want. To go one step further, it is your choice as to whether or not you want Coronary Artery Disease at all.
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