There was intelligence behind the heart god's kind, brown eyes. Dressed in khaki pants and a tee shirt, he could have been any off-duty New Yorker on a Sunday night. But his calm evening had ended as abruptly as ours did and now he and I were standing on the 11th floor of Lenox Hill Hospital with exactly the same goal, to make David well. I believed that he was the guy who could do it.
Two maintenance men were in the visitor waiting room watching TV. The room was dim and the television was loud. I headed for the payphone just outside. I would later discover that there are many places in a hospital you can safely use a cell phone. The visitor waiting room is an official one. The hallway between the elevators and the waiting room is an unofficial one. But that Sunday night, nervous about what interference my cellphone would cause, I set to work on the payphone. With a prepaid phone card that my mother had talked me into buying (3 cents a minute!) I dialed the 31 digits (1-800 #, pin #, and phone #) necessary to reach each of our family and friends. It was actually a good way to keep my mind occupied. By the time you get to the 25th number you've invested a pretty significant amount of time. The very last thing you want to do is misdial. Really.
About 20 minutes after the procedure started Gary came out to give me an update. It was the beginning of what would be a two week crash course in cardiology. David had 3 blocked arteries. Two of them were minor arteries that were 90% blocked. But these were only the supporting actors in our coronary event drama. The star was a piece of plaque that may have broken away from one of these blockages, and was lodged in a main artery, blocking it 100%. To make matters worse, all of these blockages were located high in the arteries, making them difficult and risky to work on.
That was the bad news. The good news was that our heart god was confident that he could fix everything with angioplasty and stents. As a backup there was a sugical team on-call to perform bypass surgery, but our bets were now riding on the magic hands of the man in the khaki pants. I looked at Gary. His face was serious, but his gaze was unwavering. It could be done. "OK.", I said. "Bets are placed. Let it ride."
9:50:21 AM 
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