Alegent Health

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    Cardiology Blog

  • Don't Hold Your Breath

    heart1
    16 Nov 2009 | 9:22 am
    Thank goodness.  Thank goodness I’ve finally got a little leverage I can use to convince my patients to get tested and treated. I’m talking about the ubiquitous problem of obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA.  This is a disorder where the affected person erupts into a chorus of snoring and breath holding as they drift off to sleep.  If you’ve ever witnessed these apneic episodes you’ll never forget them.  The patient starts with loud snoring but reaches a point where it seems as if he’s sucked something into the back of his throat and can’t get another breath in.  He lies there,…

  • Brain Surgery

    heart1
    9 Nov 2009 | 8:42 am
    My high school friend and I used to love the phrases “it’s not rocket science” and “it’s not brain surgery,” metaphors that allow you to compare any task to what is implicitly considered the most complex, mentally taxing jobs one could ever aspire to.  In medical school—for about 5 minutes, anyway—I set my sites on mastering neuroanatomy.  But when I couldn’t keep straight the differences between the spinothalamic tract, the fasciculus cuneatus, and the pineal gland (and what exactly is brain sand?) I gave up my dream of being a brain surgeon.  My friend, in what I…

  • Guinea Pigs

    heart1
    2 Nov 2009 | 8:49 am
    My seven-year-old daughter loves animals of all kinds. She loves snakes, spiders, bugs, birds—everything.  Her favorite are rodents of all varieties.  She has a hamster that she considers part of our family, but her infatuation with small furry animals extends to mice, voles, chipmunks and sewer rats.  She has previously told me that rodents are some of the best people she knows. With considerable dissatisfaction she recently brought to my attention the various pejorative metaphors we humans extend to our furry friends.  “Are you a man or a mouse?”  “You dirty rat.”  “He…

  • Death by Marathon

    heart1
    26 Oct 2009 | 11:50 am
    A number of people have asked my opinion regarding the risk of dying during a marathon. I consider myself qualified to comment on this—not because I am a cardiologist—but since I recently ran a marathon and felt like I was dying at about the 15th mile (and the 16th, and the 17th, and the 18th, etc.). Since this is not a posthumous blog entry you can assume that I survived all 26.2 miles and have recovered enough to write about it. The same can’t be said of the three unfortunate individuals who made the news in Detroit this week. As many of you may know this year’s Detroit Marathon was…

  • Glitches and Quirks

    heart1
    19 Oct 2009 | 6:50 am
    A number of years ago, as I was sitting in a college class, I reached down to pick up my backpack off the floor when I felt the sudden onset of intense pain in my left chest.  I sat there, unable to take a breath or even move without excruciating discomfort stabbing through my thorax.  When class ended I rushed over to the student health center and made it clear to the nurse that I was expiring from a heart attack, or something equally bad.  After some tests they concluded I wasn’t dying and let me go.  My question for them was the same that my patients ask me all the time: So, if…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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