By Nick Reiher

About a year ago, I was eating a really good turkey sandwich.

Bread was very fresh, and the turkey was tasty and plentiful.

I was lying around, watching something on TV. Tammy was with me. She had one of the good sandwiches, too.

It’s not unusual for me to remember a particularly good sandwich, when I had it and where. This one is more memorable, because I was lying in a hospital bed at St. Joe’s.

I was still in the fashionable gown they had me put on several hours earlier. Before they hooked me up to all the machines and fluids, they gave me one more shot at the bathroom, so to speak.

They wheeled me in to an operating room and moved me over to table. My doctor was there, as well as a team of really great nurses. The Doc said they were gonna put me partially out.

“Everything looks good! We’ll be able to go through your wrist and arm.”

“K,” is all I remember managing.

“You’re doing great!”

“K”

“We got very lucky.”

“K”

Before long, they put me on a gurney and wheeled me back to the room. A bit later, still groggy, I heard the Doc tell us, “Two arteries were clear. The third one was 96 percent blocked. No damage to the heart. We got lucky.”

I confirmed all of this later with Tammy when the dope finally cleared my body. Good stuff, that.

I was very lucky, because I did not have a heart attack. In fact, I didn’t have any discernable symptoms. A routine stress test a couple weeks earlier picked up the blockage. So, they scheduled an angiogram to have a closer looksee.

My stress test three years prior had been clear, as were all the previous ones. So confident was I in this one, Tammy and I visited Top Notch, an old-fashioned hamburger joint with great shakes. I hadn’t been there in some 40 years.

But a few days later, my white coat syndrome kicked in when I got the call to set up that looksee. Yeah, I was worried. My Mom died of a heart attack at 61, but she also was a three-pack-a-day smoker for probably 50 years.

I never smoked cigarette in my life. Although I got plenty of exposure when I lived at home with three smokers. It took me way too long after I moved out to realize that may have had something to do with our two canaries cashing in consecutively.

Or why the ivory-colored bust of the Madonna and Child got a very deep tan.

For a couple weeks after getting the stent, I felt as though I had been shot at. Though they missed, I still felt the shock.

What followed was six months of a blood thinner that cost more than my first car payments and deepened the bruises that came more easily. Especially when I slipped on a wooden border in our garden. I thought I stuck the landing, but the slip made me smack my left shin flush on the wood.

It was swollen and purple for weeks. Bled, too.

The lesson here: Get rid of wooden borders in your garden.

And get a heart scan, even if you have no symptoms or family history. Especially so.

I have written several stories about people who had no symptoms at all. Or not until they had a major attack. They lived, thankfully, but they said the same thing:

Get tested. Heart scans are affordable and accessible. And it could save your life.

Women, this goes for you, too.

Be well.

Nick Reiher is editor of Farmers Weekly Review.