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Maybe 5 or 10 minutes of weeding the garden, then going right to the mowing the lawn, and then I felt fatigued and I don’t feel fatigued after 10, 15 minutes. But my shoulders were very heavy. Nothing in my arms. But I just felt tired. My jaw hurt, that was weird. And then I just thought, I’ve got to go to the ER.
I got there and they took me right up to the cath lab. They kept me at the hospital for a couple extra days. They did an angiogram and they gave the angiogram to Dr. Del Rio. And instead of putting in two stents, which I thought they were going to do that day, he said, “Let’s have a talk. I think you might be a candidate for a bypass.” Well, what Dr. Del Rio said was that I am 65, I’m young, the bypass that could take care of some things with my diabetes, and that I was a good candidate for having this bypass rather than the stents.
I had confidence. Everything he had said was exactly what I was hoping for. And he looked at me and said, “Okay, then we’re on.” And what was so good is that Dr. Del Rio when he made that recommendation, he’s a specialist I wanted, and he was right here. He had worked in the Des Moines Heart Center and all over the country, but now he was in Mason City and he chose here at the Mason City Clinic. And so guess what? I chose that too. I’m so glad that I had the bypass here in Mason City. That’s where my home is. My wife could be here every day. And my son came up and visited, could have a place to stay. It was fantastic.
Well, when I was recovering, it was really remarkable to me, the nurses, I knew about 70% of them from my work as a social worker in the communities around here. All of a sudden, here they are, the next generation of people helping me. Whew. They were great and I can’t thank them enough. But what they did was they allowed me to be who I was. And I got to share my faith, my life journey, my family, they came into the room and did more than just what they were charting. They gave of themselves, and whew, they allowed me to heal.