Good luck, Adam. This is heavy duty surgery, but these guys and modern technology make it seem so simple. They going on pump or off? Open or endovascular vein harvesting? I would assume with your age you have good targets and could go off pump, but it is always surgeon's preference.
If I may, I would gladly share some light on his comment of 40% above, as this is the racket I am in. That percentage is his heart's ejection fraction, or EF. It is a measure of how much blood your heart squeezes out on each contraction (or beat). Normal hearts are in the range of 55-65%. For more, see
Ejection Fraction, or
Ejection Fraction. This number is important especially to patients with structural heart disorders, like heart attack victims, those with viral, idiopathic, or other cardiomyopathies (enlargement, etc). A reduced EF can occur, as an example, after a heart attack because some of the heart muscle is infarcted (dead), and the heart is less efficient. Severely low heart efficiency often leads to congestive heart failure, or CHF, which is a series of symptoms associated with the heart's inability to move enough blood, or equal amounts of blood to the body and lungs. Dying from pump failure (end stage CHF) is a horrible way to go, as it is slow and leads to systematic respiritory and renal failures.
Structural diseases of the heart can also lead to arrhythmias, like ventricular tachycardia or fibrillation. In these, the heart is quivering, rather than pumping, and this almost always result in sudden cardiac death. Atrial fibrillation is also common in patients with CHF, and is a disorder where your heart's physiologic pacemaker is overriden by many new "pacemakers" and the erratic signals leads to rapid and irregular heart rhythms. This disorder almost always requires anticoagulent or antithrombitic medication to reduce the resulting high risk of stroke.
In any event, we should all learn a lesson (as is what this forum does for us) from Adam's unfortunate events. If you have risk factors (family history, sedentary lifestyle, poor diet and/or clinical obesity, smoking, hypertension, poor lipoprotein profile, age, etc), you absolutely should bee seen by a cardiologist. If you ever feel chest pain during exertion, run, don't walk, to your cardiologist for an evaluation. Evaluations can be non-invasive like stress tests, nuclear scans, and CT's, or can be invasive like catheterizations.
Early evaluations are the key, because once a coronary artery becomes occluded, it is likely you will suffer muscle damage. It just snowballs from there - catheterizations, angioplasty, stents, bypass surgery, defibrillators, heart failure rehabilitation, etc. And don't even get me started on the medication list cardiac patients have to take and pay for. None of it is pretty or fun.
For more, on treatment options, see
Who I work for. Yeah, its a shameless plug, but hey, I've got stock that needs to value. If anyone has any questions, post below or PM me. I'm not a physician, but I'll share what I can without diagnosing you!
-BD