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Medical update

Saw the cardiologist today, for the first time since the hospital (two weeks ago). He says I’m as good as he can make me and turned me loose (for four more months). I still get chest pain during strenuous exercise; so I can walk every day, but I can’t run. I was concerned that the remaining chest pain might mean they missed something and I might need more work, but the doctor said that is not the case. He says the angiogram reveals blockages as small as 20%. There are no significant blockages remaining. When they saved the two major arteries in my heart, they lost a small one. It had some flow in it, but after they fixed the other two arteries, it just went away. They don’t know why that happens; sometimes it just does. The portion of my heart that is supposed to be fed by that small artery doesn’t like it when it runs out of fuel during exercise and that’s what causes the chest pain. The good news is that over time, collateral vessels will probably develop to make up the difference. This is a good place to be. We’re done with doctors having to fix things for the foreseeable future, but there is still work to be done. I get the challenge of exercising (within limits) with the expectation of improving exercise capacity. There has been a fair amount of anxiety for the six weeks or so, wondering what the outcome will be. We’re happy with this one.
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Port aransas

From the beach, we watch the tankers go back and forth through the channel to Corpus Christi. We thought that was the whole story until we read that they’re talking about widening and deepening the channel. If they deepen the channel, these tankers can carry more and empty a supertanker in four trips instead of five. As big as that ship looks, it’s tiny compared to the supertanker out there somewhere we don’t even see. The tankers are low in the water when they come in and high in the water when they go out. Guess they don’t produce enough oil in Texas, they have to put oil into the pipeline by tankerload as well.