7/20/09: “Would you rather it be opium & cocaine??”

Stress test report:

“Mr. Addict decided to have a few cocktails prior to his treadmill stress test today. After a few minutes of running Mr. Addict lay down on the treadmill and fell asleep.”
This was the report from about 3 weeks ago, fortunately Mr. Addict either decreased or eliminated (highly unlikely) the amount of liquid courage he needed for the pharmacological cardiac stress test 4 days prior. At any rate, he showed up to the clinic today reeking of alcohol demanding the results from his test. When confronted about his alcohol and tobacco consumption he exclaimed: “have you ever heard of addiction!?! Would you rather it be opium or cocaine?” Later in our conversation he dropped the not so subtle hint that the cost of opium in Egypt (where he was when he had his heart attack and stent placement 6 weeks prior) was incredibly cheap.

Choose your battles:

When my preceptor was confronted with the choice of opium or cocaine, she readily suggested that opium (by far) is the lesser of 2 evils for his heart.

Despite his multiple life style choices, Mr. Addict passed his stress test 4 days prior and it did not show any significant heart disease going on now.

Go figure: you can be a marathon runner and in the best shape of your life and drop dead secondary to a heart attack if genetics are not on your side, or you can put every poison known to man into your body and your heart can still be as strong as a bull’s. I guess the moral is that you should have fun in life no matter what it looks like, but I’m going with the have fun and be healthy choice.