#CardiacCare: Help Support Chris Buyu Recover

For Many, Life After Heart Surgery Is Surprisingly Hard - The Wall Street Journal

 

By his own admission, Chris Buyu lived for fellowship of family, friends and football. The more extended the fellowship, the fuller the life.

 

That was before November, when a jolt of pain wrenched him from sleep – The Widow-Maker.

 

The Widow-Maker is a massive heart attack that occurs when the left anterior descending artery (LAD) is totally or almost completely blocked. The critical blockage in the artery stops all the blood flow to the left side of the heart, causing the heart to stop beating normally. When this happens, patients may go into cardiac arrest.

 

Ninety minutes later, he was flat on his back at Massachusetts General Hospital, with doctors  deftly wielding their tiny laparoscopic tools to clear a potentially lethal clog in one of his arteries. Unfortunately the medical team experienced a setback.  Doctors had to carefully treat his underlying diabetic condition for a week, prior to surgery, due to kidney complications that were triggered by pre-surgery prep.

 

After they fixed his heart, the cardiologists told him: Now, it's time to change your life.

 

So they wrote prescriptions for cardiac rehabilitation and a fistful of pills - and advised reducing stress.

 

Bypass surgery and artery-clearing procedures don't actually cure patients - they only address the most pressing symptoms of heart disease. It takes lifestyle changes and medication to fix the underlying problem .

 

For Chris, this invariably means absence from work.

 

His three kids are now teens, but anxious about his incapacitation.

 

There are no safe heart attacks, but the variety Chris had is notoriously lethal: occlusion to the left anterior descending artery. That is the main power line to the left ventricle, which is the piston in the pump that supplies oxygen to the body.

 

12 months is the recommended period for cardio-rehabilitation and continued therapy under endocrinologists. 

 

It is to cover financial hardship and continued medical care during this period that I gently invite you to join me in supporting Chris.

 

Any contribution from the extended networks of family, friends and the footballing fraternity will be warmly welcomed and go to support his three children as well, namely; Diego, Mateo and Nia.