My Cardiologist is an Angel (II)

This is a continuation of my earlier article, "My Cardiologist is an Angel", in which I described the events surrounding my heart attack and two angioplasties in December, 1997. After my second angioplasty, my cardiologist, Dr. B., told me that would be the last of them. Unfortunately that turned out not to be the case.

During the spring and summer of 1998, I was heavily involved in the "Math Wars." See my Wayne State web page for all the gory details. This proved to be very stressful for me. I had a pinched nerve in my neck, which caused all sorts of misery, and then, on August 31, I had my third angioplasty with stents. Two weeks later, I had another cath (short for catheterization).

Dr. B is very adroit at mathematics, as is Dr. M1, my primary care physician. My take on this is that a lot of future doctors and lawyers are good at math when in college, but then they decide to "get real" and go to medical school or law school, rather than pursuing a career in mathematics or related disciplines. I am reminded of the old (morbid) joke that Jews don't oppose abortion because they think that a fetus doesn't become a human being until it graduates from medical school.

In this vein (artery?), there is a small probability that something will go wrong during a cath, like a clot breaking loose, for example. At some point, I asked Dr. B. if this probability decreased for repeated caths of the same person. He said "Yes, they are not independent events." - score one for probability literacy* - and he agreed that the probability of something going wrong no doubt decreased with each subsequent cath. After what was my fifth cath, in mid-September of 1998, (three involving an angioplasty with stents, and two not), Dr. B. said there was some problem at the intersection of two coronary arteries which could be dealt with using the "roto-rooter" procedure, but that he preferred to treat it with medication. (Famous last words!) I said that I didn't mind having the procedure done, as long as the person doing it had some experience at it. His reply: "I don't think we should keep on doing this. Something might happen." So much for decreasing probabilities!

I was given two pictures from that last cath, which I posted on the door of my office at Wayne State. After a while I took them down, for fear that some student who knew how to interpret them might be shocked that I was still alive.

My latest cath was three years ago, and there was a problem at the site of the incision, but that is the main problem I will have to worry about if I ever have another one.

(*) In probability theory, two events are "independent" if the outcome of one has no effect on the other. For example, if you toss a fair coin repeatedly, the probability of "heads" is always ½, regardless of what the outcome was in earlier tosses. By the Law of Large numbers, you "expect" that the percentage of "heads" will get close to ½ as the number of tosses increases. Repeated caths on the same person are not "independent", because, I assume, the probability of something going wrong is based on the historical data, which is "trumped" by what happens in a particular person's case.