As best I can understand, this is how things stand:
Last Wednesday, just before my grandfather was released from the hospital, his heart doctor, Agorwol, waltzed in and announced, "We're signing you out, but you have to come back in a few weeks." When my very bewildered grandfather asked why, Agorwol replied, "Because we need to do a bypass on the right side." The bombshell thus dropped, out the doctor went -- and a family friend visited my grandfather moments later, only to find him in tears. My grandfather fears hospitals, and the way in which the news was broken was insensitive, to say the least.
Then we discovered that the bypass could have been done that very day, but Agorwol preferred to schedule the surgery for six weeks from now because my grandfather "had made it clear that he wished to go home." That's all well and good -- yes, Pop-Pop very much DID want to go home -- but the option of having the surgery last Wednesday was never presented! My grandfather would have vastly preferred ONE lengthy hospitalization to ICU, Round Two!
Fast forward to 1 p.m. today, when a heart attack hit the left side of Pop-Pop's heart, near where there are already stints in place -- NOT on the right side, where Agorwol claims there are blockages to be bypassed.
Two Nitro pills and three Bayer Aspirin stopped the event within minutes, and my grandfather is currently stable. The ambulance skipped the local hospital and delivered him directly to the Cardiology Center in Salisbury, Maryland, where he was eventually transferred last time. It ended up being a smart move, because the best heart surgeon in the Del-Mar area just happened to be on an ER rotation today, and he just happens to be the personal doctor of Danny, my grandfather's best friend. Danny showed this other doctor my grandfather's heart scans and pictures, and this surgeon announced, "I don't know why there are 35 pictures here, when the cardiologist only should have needed 10, but they are all of such poor quality that I honestly cannot tell you where the bypass sites are supposedly located."
Translation: In six weeks' time, Agorwol would have opened up my grandfather's chest and commenced blindly poking and prodding without any accurate, medically sound impression of WHERE blockages needed to be bypassed and WHERE new valves needed to be attached. Although no one is saying so, I have a feeling that the surgery would probably have been botched, and that if the screw-up hadn't killed him, he would have had to go under the knife a second time.
And so this surgeon has taken over my grandfather's care and will do his own angioplasty, take his own pictures, and if necessary, perform bypasses on the CORRECT sites. He is also going to figure out where else stints might be needed on the left side of the heart. In his words, "Mr. Wilkerson just had the same exact heart attack that he did on Thanksgiving day, in the same location. Obviously, his stints did not open the blockage that is causing the cardiac events; they just opened two other problem sites."
So I don't know what will need to be done, but it would seem that my Pop-Pop is in the best possible hands; and that if it weren't for today's events, the full picture of Agorwol's fuckups would never have been made clear.
