The routine has become all too familiar.  Wait and wait and wait until the nurses come up from the first floor to wheel Nyel to the cath lab*.  I follow behind, into the service elevator, down four stories and to the outside of the big double doors.  “This is where we part company,” they say.  “Time to send him off with a kiss.”

I watch as they wheel Nyel on through and wait a few moments while they bring me a pager.  It looks a lot like the ones you are given when you wait for a table at the Outback. But I know from past experience that any similarity ends when the pager goes off.  The one I will be carrying around with me for the next few hours absolutely vibrates right out of your grasp if you are not careful, and the alarm is so loud that everyone around you leaps to attention.  It is scary-to-the-max!

“Past Experience.”   Those are the operable words.  This is Nyel’s second trip to the cath lab during this hospital stay and we think (we’ve sort of lost count) it’s his fifth since October. The first time and these two recent times were to send a teeny-tiny camera (and other measuring equipment?) up through an artery from groin to heart.

On the second occasion, a surgeon reamed out a calcified artery with a teeny-tiny drill (also sent up the artery from groin to heart) and placed four stents**.  Nyel’s third and longest stay (nine hours!) in the cath lab was for an ablation*** during which another surgeon used a teeny-tiny laser tool to modify individual cells in various places in his heart.

Yesterday’s procedure was so short by comparison to the others, it was hard to believe it was over.  Plus, the scary pager never went off.  I had hardly returned to the Cath Lab Waiting Area after a Caesar salad in the Heart Beat Café when here came Nyel’s doctor, all smiles.  I very nearly said to him, “Wait a minute.  Aren’t you supposed to be in the Cath Lab with Nyel?”  But, he looked so pleased and was so eager to tell me that Nyel’s heart looked better than it had since February, that I just smiled and smiled right along with him.

Home today!  Woot! Woot!

*A catheterization laboratory or cath lab is an examination room in a hospital or clinic with diagnostic imaging equipment used to visualize the arteries of the heart and the chambers of the heart and treat any stenosis or abnormality found.

** Stents are small, expandable tubes, usually made of metal mesh, put into arteries in a procedure called a percutaneous coronary intervention or, its more common name, angioplasty.

***Cardiac ablation uses long, flexible tubes (catheters) inserted through a vein or artery in the groin and threaded to the heart to deliver energy in the form of heat or extreme cold to modify the tissues in the heart that cause an arrhythmia.