What You’ll Learn

67-year-old Georgia man shares his quintuple bypass journey, revealing the emotional toll and challenges of rural healthcare access after a cardiac event.

VIVO: I’d love to hear maybe the best experience you’ve had with healthcare and how it made you feel.

Interviewee: The best experience I’ve had with healthcare in general? I don’t really know. Before this, I just went to a regular doctor for regular checkups and pain management, because I have… She gives me Percocet, like 30 every three months, that I manage myself. I take half of one when I can’t stand it anymore. But other than that, I’ve got diabetes. I’ve got a problem with my bladder where the first doctor said it was cancer, but the second docto,r who did a surgery, he said, “No.” He quit after about 15 minutes and said, “No, that’s not cancer.” But I still have it, and this was over 10 years ago, so they don’t know what to do about it.

VIVO: Well, then let’s look at the other side of it. What’s your worst experience in healthcare? Would you say it was that experience, or was there something else?

Interviewee: That guy who told me it was cancer, that was the worst. He was just… Hoo-wee. With what they have to do, they do a camera, and he was just rough the whole time. Shoved it in, yanked it out. Immediately just said, “It’s cancer,” and yanked it back out. And I was like, I’m not going back to that guy. So then I researched trying to find a better guy, and I found somebody and went and saw him. And just told him, “Hey, would you please treat me like I’m your brother-in-law, or somebody?”

VIVO: Somebody you’re going to be a little more slow moving with. Well, I think I jumped the gun here a little bit. Why don’t you tell me your age, occupation, family life, where you live, just some basic information there.

Interviewee: I live in Dawsonville, Georgia now. Born in Savannah, Georgia, so kind of moved around. I’m 67, I’ll be 68 next month. Had the heart event. I guess it was a little over four years ago now, 2020 when I had it, during COVID. I’ve had my own business since 30 years ago. So I work as Martin Business Products, but I used to have a lot of customers. And then gradually I got so many contract situations through a company in Texas that I let my customers go, because I didn’t have time to do it all.

So at the moment, I have not really had a lot of work for the past few years. I have some occasional stuff. And it happens that right now I am on a job site, because I got called in. They fired the guy that was here and I’m the only one that… I trained him. I go in a lot of times if somebody wants a vacation, they teach me the job, what I need to do at the site. I’m IT desk side support. So they teach me their site, then they go on vacation or whatever. And through the years it’s been, that guy got fired, so they asked me to come in.

VIVO: Tell me, what heart disease have you been diagnosed with?

Interviewee: Here’s the funny thing. I don’t really remember what he… It’s all arterial, whatever they say. Do you want the story of how we got there?

VIVO: Yeah, let’s hear that. Tell me everything that led up to it.

Interviewee: For a couple of days I had a couple of different strange things. We had just bought a house, and me and the wife did all the remodeling work ourselves. And a couple of times, I was just walking out through the garage to get something, and I almost blacked out, stumbled sideways, and thought, that’s strange. But I continued on.

I was pressure washing the driveway, I had one of the kinds that spins. I was pressure washing the driveway for a couple of days, because it’s a big driveway. So I guess it was a Thursday night, I was sitting on the couch watching TV and I felt like somebody put a barbell on me. And I thought, that’s weird. Maybe it’s just muscle from doing what I’d been doing.

And then all of a sudden I felt all this tingling in my neck and I felt like I had a cramp in my neck and jaw. And I thought, I think I’ve read about this, that that’s one of the signs. So I went and ate three aspirin and went to bed. Told my wife, I said, “I don’t feel right,” and I went to bed. This was like seven o’clock. And about 4:00 in the morning I woke up with the same things again, the chest and my neck hurting. And so I figured, I ate some more aspirin and went back to bed. And I figured, when I wake up I’ll ask the wife to take me to the doctor, because I didn’t trust driving.

So I woke up and she was gone. And I texted her and I said, “When are you coming back?” And she said, “When I get done.” Helpful. When she came back, I said, “Take me to the doctor. I don’t feel safe driving. Something’s going on.”

So she took me to the regular doctor and the regular doctor just started shaking her head and she said, “You got to go to the hospital.” And so I went to the hospital. This was Friday morning at this point. So I went to the hospital near where we lived, where we live now, but it’s not that convenient. The hospitals up here in north Georgia, there’s not a whole lot of them near anything. So I went to one called Piedmont Mountainside in Jasper, Georgia where those people are great. They get you in, they take care of you. And we already knew this from an incident my wife had with a heart problem.

So went there, and they plugged me up, do everything, and all day long. And came back and said, “Your blood has the marker that you had a cardiac event, but what you’re going to need we can’t do.” So I was like, “What does that mean?” “You’re going to have to have heart catheterization.” So they said, “We’re going to send you to Piedmont in Atlanta.”

So I called the wife and said, “I need you to bring me some clothes and stuff.” And the nurse says, “She can’t come in because of COVID.” And I said, “Are you kidding?” I said, “She lives with me. How could I possibly get anything from her since this morning?” So that nurse was very nice, she said, “I agree with you.” And she let her in.

VIVO: Oh, good.

Interviewee: I said, “This might be the last time I see her for all we know.” So they sent me to Piedmont in Atlanta and I didn’t get there until seven o’clock at night. Then they said, “What you need, we can’t do until Monday,” because they don’t do anything like that. Unless I was dying right then, they’re not doing the heart cath. So had to wait until Monday. They kept me on nitroglycerin patches and heparin. I don’t remember all the stuff they had me on.

But so then Monday, they took me to the heart catheterization thing, and the guy did… They go through your wrist and… It’s a big hole. So the guy, when he got done, I said, “So y’all are going to put a stent in or something like that?” Because my buddy who’s had a stent kept saying, “Oh, they’ll just put a stent in.” And he started laughing and he said, “Man, you got to have bypasses.” And that was when it really hit home was like, oh, come on, you’re kidding me.

But see, my father had heart bypasses when he was 50. He had a quadruple bypass. So I had a quintuple, which I didn’t even know what to call it. I kept calling it a Cinco de Mayo because I was like, what is five bypasses? What do you call it?

VIVO: That’s great intel. So you mentioned you have family history of heart events.

Interviewee: Yep.

VIVO: And then I believe you said earlier you have diabetes, is that correct?

Interviewee: Yes.

VIVO: Did you have any other factors that could be considered risk symptoms, like a high blood pressure or high cholesterol?

Interviewee: Yeah, I had high blood pressure. I forgot about that.

VIVO: Did you smoke or-

Interviewee: No, that’s the question they… I used to. They said, “Do you smoke?” I says, “No. I used to.” And they said, “When did you quit?” I said, “I didn’t write it down. It’s been like 20 years.” I said, “But in college I smoked three packs a day.” And that was when I quit-quit was because I looked at them and said, this thing is making me do it. So I quit, but I then reached this stage where I could go fishing all night with a friend of mine and smoke cigarettes all night, and then put them down and don’t touch them again.

VIVO: And don’t touch them. That makes sense.

Interviewee: And that drove him crazy. But at the time of this, I hadn’t had cigarettes in 20 years.

VIVO: Did you know that any of those were risk signs for potential heart disease? Was it a factor to you, or how did that exist with you?

Interviewee: It wasn’t in my mind. It had always been in my mind that daddy had a heart… Sorry, I’m 67 years old. I still call him daddy.

VIVO: That’s okay.

Interviewee: I’m southern, that’s what we do. It’s mama and daddy. So it didn’t really… I didn’t think about it that much. I knew daddy had had it, his brothers had had it, and I didn’t think about it that much, because I didn’t really feel bad.

VIVO: Sure.

Interviewee: And I had had one of these free scan things where they tell you about your clogged arteries, and I think they said something about that showed signs of it, but nobody thought it was something serious at the time.

VIVO: That makes sense.

Interviewee: Until those couple times that I felt really strange and stumbled sideways, I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t feel like-

VIVO: You didn’t until you did.

Interviewee:: Yeah, because like I said, she and I remodeled the house. We gutted the kitchen, the bathroom. I put in all the cabinets by myself and moved electrical, moved plumbing. I did all these things. And yeah, I get tired, but I was already 64 then, I guess.

VIVO: How did you feel when you were waiting? In that in-between time of going to Piedmont, first location of Piedmont, before you went to Piedmont Atlanta, what were you emotionally feeling?

Interviewee: Everything. The reality of everything setting in. I did a thing years ago called life training, and in that they talk about life shocks that we get in life. And that it’s steering us, and we either say yes to them or no to them when things happen. So that was on my mind. When I’m there, I’m like, this is what’s happening. I can either say no to it or just accept that I’m here and that these people know better than me what to do. Letting go of wanting to control something like that is tough.

So it was a lot of just reminding myself that I’m on the ride with them. They tell me what I need to do and I just do it, because what are you going to do? I got frustrated when I got to Piedmont in Atlanta and found out they weren’t going to do anything until Monday. Plus I was already past the time to get a meal and I haven’t eaten all day, so I was getting very frustrated there. And luckily, I guess the nurse, whatever he was, he found me some chicken and broccoli and brought that to me to eat. But I started calling around trying to find somebody else that would go ahead and do the heart catheterization.

VIVO: Oh, so you were feeling ready to get it done?

Interviewee: Yeah, I’m like, wait until Monday? What are you talking… But I called around and found out nobody will. Unless they think you’re dying right then, they’re not going to do the heart catheterization. So then it was a lot of tests leading up to that. I skipped all that. They wheel you in to look at this and wheel you in to look at that.

But after they did the heart cath, then they got to find a vein in your leg to take and all… More tests. And I remember one nurse, they’re always verifying who you are and that you’re awake. And I remember one of the nurses, they wheel me in and she says, “Do you know why you’re here?” I said, “Because my mama and daddy had sex in 1956.”

VIVO: Technically true.

Interviewee: That’s why I’m here. But I guess that showed her I knew enough of what was going on that I wasn’t out of it. That was another thing about waiting, because you find out there’s a lot of people a lot worse off in the same ward where they put me. There was a lot of older people that really couldn’t do for themselves in their 80s and stuff, and you’d hear them moaning and… That felt bad, because I felt healthy compared to all that.

VIVO: That makes sense. It is good to feel grateful for what you’ve got, even if you’re in a hard spot. So you mentioned that you did have to be transported from one location to the other. Do you think that your location being in a more rural than an urban area, being in a more rural spot, what role did that play in any of this?

Interviewee: Partially it was why I didn’t call an ambulance the night I first felt the pain, because it was like, I’m so far away from anything like that. And I ate the aspirin. When it helped, I just said, I’ll just go tomorrow. And even then I didn’t think going to the hospital, the doctor was closer, and went to the regular doctor. My tendency is to think, I’m overreacting. This is not serious. So that’s why, let’s just go to regular doctor first.

VIVO: So that distance kind of made you say, oh, I’ll take some aspirin. We can wait.

Interviewee: Right. And even when I told the doctor where I was going to go, she cringed and was saying, “Why don’t you go to Northside?” Because there was one of them a little further away. And I said, “Piedmont takes care of you,” because I already had the experience with my wife that… She had something called… I don’t even remember what you call it, but she had to have an ablation where they go in and burn the circuits. Because her heart would just start going 200 beats a minute and wouldn’t stop until they gave her drugs, and it started happening more frequently. So we had experience with those people that they’re great, and that was why I went there.

VIVO: That’s great. It’s great to have that. And what would you say your daily activities, some of your habits were prior to the diagnosis?

Interviewee: Like I said, I was working on the house a lot for months. She and I painted it, we did all the work on the house. Only thing we didn’t do is we didn’t do the carpet, the tile and the countertops, everything else we did in remodeling this house. So that’d been going on for months.

VIVO: Obviously that’s a strenuous routine, right? Did you have any, prior to even that, like a regular exercise routine or any certain habits?

Interviewee: Before I met the wife 20 years ago, I was going to the gym three days a week and working out. I had a personal trainer who I said I wanted an older guy, not some young kid who doesn’t understand. But I was going three days a week and I weighed 175 pounds or something when I met her. And then she’s like, “You want me to make some cookies tonight? You want me to make a cake this weekend?” “No, I would hate that. That would be terrible.” I still think women like to fatten us up so nobody else wants us. But so I got fattened up pretty good.

Before I started going to the gym, I had gotten to 235. And that’s when I started, I would walk at night and walk early in the mornings in my neighborhood until I started losing weight and getting some strength.

VIVO: You started doing this recently or after you-

Interviewee: No, that was before I even went to the gym 20 years ago. So then after the heart thing, when I got home, I would go walk down the driveway into the street. It was a very slow and gingerly done walk, because you get split open in the chest, things don’t seem to get back together very easily.

VIVO: That’s fair.

Interviewee: And you worry that it’s not going to heal, because there’s a lot of people that don’t, that end up having to go back and have metal plates put in, things like that. So funny story though. I would go walk, and the oldest cat we had then, she was 16 or something, and I looked at her one day, I got off, she’d come get on the couch with me, which she never did. She’d come get on the couch with me. And so I got up one day to go for the walk, and I looked at her and I said, “You want to go with me?”

The cat got down off the couch and followed me all the way out to the street, all the way down the street and back again. And she did this every day after that. When I’d say, “You want to go with me?” And the cat would go with me. And then wasn’t very long, she died. I woke up one morning and she was drooling in the corner, so I had to have her put to sleep.

VIVO: And so, do you have any particular routines, in addition to the one you were just telling me about, since you’ve had the cardiac event that are in response to that?

Interviewee: I’m bad about it. I got one of those HealthRider things, I don’t know if you know what they are, but you sit on it like a bicycle, but it’s your own weight. You row and the seat goes up and then you have a place for your feet. So it’s all your own body weight. And I’ve done it some, and then I get… The diabetes has caused pretty bad neuropathy in my feet, so my feet hurt pretty bad. So almost anything, even when I would go walking after the surgery, it was bad, but I had to. I knew I had to get walking.

Even in the hospital, I think by the second day I was up and walking. They did the surgery on a Wednesday night, I guess, and woke up Thursday. So I woke up Thursday… No, I woke up Wednesday night around 10 o’clock at night, and by four in the morning I was already in a chair and doing x-ray stuff. And then they took me to a room by 11:00, and I think that afternoon I got up and would walk with my whole of drugs and stuff and walk up and down the halls, because I wanted to get out of there. And that Sunday, they sent me home.

So I continued the walking at home, because I knew I had to. I’ve never felt right since. I get tired a lot and I can’t sleep at night. I end up a lot of nights, I don’t go to bed until seven o’clock in the morning. I stay up all night and when she gets up, then I go get in the bed and go to sleep, and I may sleep until 2:00 in the afternoon. And some days I can’t even sleep then, and I finally go lay down at 2:00 in the afternoon instead of getting up then. And I don’t know if it’s related to all that or not. I know that it’s been that way ever since. I can’t seem to get to sleep and I don’t feel right. I don’t feel strong at all anymore.

VIVO: Does that change how you view yourself?

Interviewee: Oh, yeah.

VIVO: How so?

Interviewee: Just the inability to do things. Part of what I have always done with my work is that if people need network cabling done, I’ll go do it. I’ll run the cable, run it down the walls, get jacks and do all that. I can’t do it anymore. I wouldn’t tell people that I could, because I don’t want to even be on a ladder, it’s too-

VIVO: Gotcha.

Interviewee: I don’t have enough balance anymore to stay on a ladder. So I’ve turned down work since all this.

VIVO: So I’m curious, what do you think maybe are the biggest misconceptions about heart disease, particularly for men?

Interviewee: Being a man in the old… Everybody knows. Men just don’t go to the doctor. We don’t want to go to the doctor. It’s like, I’ll get through with whatever it is. And it’s still that way, it’s like, glad they were able to do this, but I don’t want to go. But I go now at least every three months to see the regular doctor, but the cardiologist I saw… The one who did the surgery, they don’t see you anymore. He did one video call like this with me and he said, “I think you’re good to go,” and, “Go see a regular guy.”

So I went to see a regular guy and found out recently, he’s not practicing anymore. He’s old like me. And I haven’t gone and found a new one. The wife just found one for her, and so I’m going to go try to make an appointment with him. Because I need to get something looked at. They want to do stress tests and make sure, and I’m not good at those at all. I have to sit down. If I do much of anything, I have to sit down. So physically, I still don’t feel… And I don’t know. She’ll tell me, “If you’d just get more exercise, you’d feel better.” I don’t know about that anymore. She does, she walks a couple of miles a day on a treadmill.

VIVO: Do you have any goals for yourself?

Interviewee: Wake up in the morning? Not really. Win a World Series of Poker ring from a circuit event. I like to go play poker. I just went to Cherokee at the beginning of this month and played. I did all this stuff I wanted to do. And what that means is I cashed in some of the tournaments and that’s… I like to go do that. And even that’s painful, just sitting there for so long. I have to get up and move around, and my legs start hurting. But that’s really the only… I don’t… I feel a little bit useless at times now. I don’t feel like I’m good for much of anything.

VIVO: I’m sorry-

Interviewee: There it is. I don’t know.

VIVO: No, I mean, I appreciate you sharing that. That’s a hard thing to say. So thank you for sharing it with me. I know, I think I’ve got to wrap up my time here and give you your day back. In kind of closing, I want to thank you for sharing your story with me and just ask if you have any advice for somebody if they were diagnosed with heart disease today, what advice would you give them?

Interviewee: I think just listen to the doctors, because they’ve done this before. When I went down there and when they first did the heart cath and then they said, “Oh, you got to have bypasses.” That afternoon this doctor walked in, someone I’ve never seen, with his assistant, and he says, “We’re going to go ahead and do this Wednesday or Thursday.” And I’m like, “Wait a minute, who are you?” And so he told me his name. When he left, I googled him and he’s the director of Piedmont Hospital’s Marcus Valve Heart Center.

VIVO: Wow.

Interviewee: So I thought, luck of the draw. I’ll take this guy. If he’s running the show at the heart valve thing. So I found out he was a renowned surgeon in Atlanta area. So again, going with the flow, going with what the doctors are telling you. If something sounds wrong, then question it. But I think that’s another hard thing for men, and it may be for women too. My wife would be that way. Not just accepting things they say at face value is a thing men are going to do. We’re not going to say, “Oh, you go ahead and cut me open,” without some information.

VIVO: It makes me curious, knowing everything you know now about your experience, is there anything you wish you knew prior to your heart event that would’ve changed anything?

Interviewee: I wish I’d gone to a doctor that had said, “Hey, let’s do these tests.” Because if I’d had the tests done sooner than I might’ve… I doubt avoided it, but at least it wouldn’t have been an urgent thing. We could have planned it and all. But the doctor who did the surgery, when we talked about it, he said, “This didn’t happen overnight. It’s not like…” Because I said, “I don’t eat that bad. I eat chicken, I eat vegetables. I don’t even eat that much red meat.” And that’s when he said, “This didn’t happen overnight. This has been happening your whole life.” I guess my father having it, his brother’s having it, it’s more hereditary than I guess we like to admit.

VIVO: Yeah.

Interviewee: So if it’s in your family, go find a doctor who will do some tests. Don’t just take their drugs and say okay, because like mine wanted to give me all these cholesterol drugs and stuff, but I wasn’t taking them. They all had so many side effects. Some make my legs worse, get cramps in the middle of the night, statins and… And I was taking the blood pressure pills. The weird thing is I don’t take them anymore.

Another piece was after about a week of being home, I just felt wrong. So I got a heart monitor thing and my heart was doing like 110 beats a minute when I wake up in the morning. And it stayed like that all the time. So I called the nurse and the nurse said, “You should go back to the hospital.” So I drove myself back down to Piedmont, and that was a terrible night because they put an alarm on the bed. Don’t ever tell them that you’ve fallen. If they say, “If you’ve fallen in the last month or so,” say no, even if you have, because they put an alarm on your bed and now you can’t go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without setting off an alarm.

VIVO: Oh, no.

Interviewee: So never say yes to that question. But I had fallen. I had fallen. I got up one morning and I fell into a corner where we have windows that meet, and I fell into that corner, destroyed the blinds on one of them, which were brand new because we’d only been there a few months.

And so went back that night. They put an alarm on my bed. At like, I don’t know, 3:00 in the morning or something, they come in and wake you up off there. They found that my blood sugar was low, because they were giving me insulin while… So then she says, she starts trying to inject this glucose into my thing. I said, “That’s hurting.” And she says, “We’ve got to do it.” And I said, “No, we don’t. Why don’t you give me one of those tubes that you can just eat the sugar?” And she says, “You have to eat the whole thing.” I said, “Why? Why can’t you just let me eat some of it and then test my sugar?” It’s not like you got to do this instantly.

So those are partially when you do have to speak up for yourself, because they’re just following routine, a lot of the nurses and stuff. And then another bad part of that night was I got up and went to the bathroom, I don’t care whether the alarms going off or not. And that brought everybody down the hall, and there’s some guy outside the bathroom door yelling through the door to me that I can’t just get up and I’ve got to wait on them to come. And I said, “Look, man, I’m 64 years old. I’m not sitting here waiting on you to let me go to the bathroom.” I said, “In fact, it’s an insult that right now I’m sitting on the toilet and you’re out there talking to me through the door. I’m a grown man.” And I said, “I don’t need that alarm, so you can either shut it off or you can come every time I get up.” Because I’m going to get up every hour, every two hours because of the diabetes and whatever my bladder condition.

So those were the bad experiences. And then another part of the bad experiences is you’ve had heart surgery, you’ve had your breastbone cut in half, anybody coming in the room wearing perfumes or even scented skin lotions and stuff, nobody that works in the hospital should do that. They should not have any scents on them, because making me start sneezing right after that is a very bad thing.

VIVO: Oh, that sounds very painful.

Interviewee: It wasn’t good. And like I said too, a lot of the medical staff are great, but a lot of them shouldn’t even be in the job. One girl came in to do my blood pressure in the middle of the night, and she put the cuff over the IV line so that when it’s blowing up, it’s digging the thing down into my arm. And I said, “Stop. That hurts.” She says, “I’ll get it in a minute.” I said, “No, hell you won’t.” I ripped the cuff off, and she went running out of the room and I never saw that one again.

So if anything, I’d recommend for anybody that’s going to the hospital with any of this is you need to be your own advocate. If you can, have a family member with you a lot of the time, because they’re going to ignore you. They act like you don’t know what you’re doing, that you’re doped up or something, whatever, and they don’t pay attention.

Participant Profile

• Male heart disease patient who underwent quintuple bypass surgery
• Lives in Dawsonville, Georgia (rural area)
• 67 years old (approaching 68)
• Self-employed in IT field as desk side support for 30+ years
• Medical history includes diabetes, bladder condition, high blood pressure
• Family history of heart disease (father had quadruple bypass at age 50)