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 THE ZIPPER CLUB Stan Holub's heart page · Southwest Side, Chicago
What Happened | Know the Signs | The Operation | The Blues | Cardiac Rehab | Eating | The Pipe | Mended Hearts | Walking Log The Zipper Club is what the guys call it. You can join any time you want. All you need is a heart attack and a good surgeon, and you get a scar down the middle of your chest like a zipper on a jacket. Dues are paid in full in advance, believe me. I joined in January. My name is Stan Holub. I'm 59. I've been a tool room machinist for forty-one years, the last twenty-six at the same shop on the Southwest Side, about ten minutes from the bungalow where Judy and I raised our kids. I make the dies and fixtures and gauges that the guys out on the floor use to make the parts. Close tolerances. I like a job where you can measure whether you did it right. My wife Judy is going to chime in here and there. She was there for all of it, and she remembers it better than me, since I was asleep for some of the important parts. You'll know it's her because it's in red. [Judy here. He was asleep for the important parts and awake for the complaining. Hello everybody.]
WHAT HAPPENED Let me tell you how smart I was. The first weekend of January we got that big New Year's snow, the one that shut down half the city, and I shoveled our walk and the widow's next door and the alley behind the garage. By myself. Because I'm a tough guy. My chest felt tight that night and I figured I pulled something. The next two weeks I had what I called indigestion. It would come and go. I ate a lot of antacids. I didn't tell Judy, because she'd make me go to the doctor, and I didn't have time for the doctor. Tuesday, January 19, 1999, about half past nine in the morning, I was standing at the surface grinder and it felt like somebody parked a forklift on my chest. Then my left arm started to ache, down to the elbow, and I broke out in a sweat like I'd been in the shower, and I felt sick to my stomach. I sat down on an overturned bucket. Willie, who runs the machine next to mine, took one look at me and went for the phone. I told him not to bother, I'd drive myself to the doctor. Willie said a word I won't put on the Internet and called 911 anyway. Thank God for Willie. The paramedics were there in a few minutes. At the hospital they told me I was having a heart attack and took me up for an angiogram, where they put dye in your arteries and take pictures. Four of the arteries that feed the heart were blocked up bad. The surgeon, Dr. Wolf, came in and drew me a picture on a napkin, which I appreciated as a machinist. Thursday morning, January 21, he did a quadruple bypass. [I got the call at work from the foreman. I don't remember driving to the hospital. I remember Stan on the stretcher telling the nurse he had to be back at the shop by Thursday because he had a job due. That's my husband.]
KNOW THE SIGNS This is the most important part of this page, so I'm putting it near the top. If I'd paid attention I might have got to the hospital sooner, with less damage. Heart attack warning signs:
If you're a guy like me who thinks the doctor is for other people: I know. I was you. Make the call anyway. Let them tell you it was gas. Nobody at the hospital is going to laugh at you, and if they do, you're alive to hear it.
THE OPERATION I'm not going to get into the gory parts, because I don't remember them and Judy doesn't want to. Here's the general idea, the way Dr. Wolf drew it on the napkin. When the arteries on your heart get clogged, they can take a vein out of your leg and an artery from inside your chest wall and use them to build detours around the blockages, like running new pipe around a bad section of line. Four blockages, four detours. That's the "quadruple." During the operation a machine does the work of your heart and lungs so they can work on a heart that's holding still. I woke up in intensive care with Judy holding my hand. The first thing I asked was whether they'd called the shop. The nurses had me sitting up in a chair the next day and walking the hallway the day after that. They gave me a pillow shaped like a heart to hug against my chest when I had to cough or sneeze, and you will hug that pillow like it's your firstborn. The nurses all signed mine. It's on the couch in the front room. My leg, where they took the vein, was sorer than my chest for a while, which nobody tells you either. I went home a week later, Thursday, January 28. No driving for several weeks, no lifting anything heavier than a coffee cup for a good while, and no shoveling snow, ever again, according to Judy, who has hired the kid down the block for life.
THE BLUES NOBODY WARNED ME ABOUT This part's hard to write, so I'll just write it. About two weeks after I got home I got low. Real low. I'd sit in the chair and not want to do anything. I cried at a commercial for long distance. I cried at a Sox game, and not because of the score, although that too. I'm a Polish guy from Archer Avenue. We don't do that. I thought I was losing my mind, or that the surgery had done something to my brain. When I started cardiac rehab I finally told Sandra, the nurse who ran my sessions. She said, Stan, half the men in this room went through the same thing. It's very common after a heart attack and after bypass, and you tell your doctor about it, because it can be treated, and because it can get in the way of getting better. So I told my doctor. We talked about it, and he helped. It lifted, slowly, over the spring. Nobody warned me. So I'm warning you. If you or your husband or your dad gets low after heart surgery, it's not weakness and it's not forever. Tell the doctor. Tell somebody. [I knew something was wrong when he stopped arguing with the TV. Wives, you know what I mean.]
CARDIAC REHAB If your doctor says cardiac rehab, you go. Don't argue. I started Monday, March 1, three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for twelve weeks. What it is: exercise, but watched. They hook you up to a heart monitor with little wires and you get on the treadmill or the bike or this arm-crank thing, and the nurses watch your heart on screens at the desk and check your blood pressure before and after. Every week they turn it up a notch. The first day I did a few minutes on the treadmill, slow, and I was sure I was going to drop dead in front of everybody. I didn't. Nobody does. That's the point of having the nurses there: you find out what your heart can do while somebody's watching it. There are classes too. What to eat, how to read a label, what all your new pills are for and why you don't skip them, how to handle stress, when you can go back to work. The classes are where you meet the other guys and gals, and that's half of it. We had a retired cop, a nun, a bus driver, a fellow who owns a bakery (he had it coming, he says), and me. I graduated Friday, May 21, 1999. Thirty-six sessions. They give you a certificate. Judy framed it. It's hanging next to my apprenticeship papers from 1958.
WHAT I EAT NOW I'm not going to give you numbers. Your doctor and the dietitian will give you yours. I'll just tell you what changed at our house:
I missed Pączki Day this year, Tuesday, February 16, for the first time in my life. Fifty-nine years. That one hurt. [I boil the pierogi now instead of frying them in butter. He noticed. He ate them anyway. I call that progress. And I'm eating the same way he is, which my own doctor says is good for me too.]
THE PIPE I smoked a pipe for forty years. Started in the Army. Never thought of it as smoking, exactly, because it was a pipe, which is what I'd tell Judy. Dr. Wolf thought of it as smoking. I haven't had it since the morning of January 19, and I'm not going back. The first month I was in the hospital and then too sick to care. The second month was the hard part. What helped was keeping my hands busy (I'm building a ship model for my grandson, which is a whole other web page), walking when I wanted it, and Judy hiding the tobacco tin, which I found, and threw out myself. Your doctor can help you quit. There's the patch and the gum and other things now. Use them. Whatever you smoke, quit. The pipes are in a rack in the basement. Judy wants to throw them out. I keep them the way a guy keeps his old bowling trophies.
MENDED HEARTS Two days after my surgery an old guy in a cardigan knocked on the door of my room and said, "I'm Tom, I'm with Mended Hearts, and I had my bypass in 1988." He was 72, he'd walked over from the parking garage, and he looked better than me. That's all he had to do. Just stand there, eleven years later. He sat with me and Judy for twenty minutes and told us what the next weeks would be like, and he was right about all of it. Mended Hearts is a national group of heart patients and their families. It's been around since 1951. Their volunteers visit people in the hospital after heart surgery, and their chapters meet once a month. I've been going to our chapter's meetings since the spring, and this fall I'm taking the training to be a visitor myself. Tom Vickers is going to be my sponsor, which means I owe him coffee for the rest of my life. The American Heart Association also has a lot of good free booklets on the warning signs, on food, and on recovering from surgery. Your hospital or your doctor's office probably has a rack of them. Their local office is in the phone book.
Where I am now: I went back to the shop part-time Monday, June 7, mornings only. The guys had a cake for me (I had a small piece, Judy, a small piece). Willie got a card signed by everybody and a little brass zipper one of the apprentices made on the lathe. I'm going to stay part-time till I'm 62 and then I'm done. Three more years. Judy and our daughter Lorie are already planning what I'm going to do with my retirement, which apparently involves a lot of walking. If you're in the Zipper Club too, or somebody you love just joined, write to me. I check the e-mail every night after supper.
WALKING LOG
     Last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999 Stan Holub · [email protected] I'm a machinist, not a doctor. Ask your own doctor about your own heart.
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