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Post by alum on Feb 18, 2024 20:43:12 GMT -5
Dan S. ‘75 is at home recovering from heart surgery per his employer, the Boston Globe. Hope he recovers quickly.
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Post by hchoops on Feb 18, 2024 21:51:15 GMT -5
Wow A stunner. Get well soon, redhead
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Post by alum on Mar 4, 2024 9:39:47 GMT -5
The Globe's Brian McGrory details Dan's effort to get a final column done before surgery www.bostonglobe.com/2024/03/04/metro/columnist-dan-shaughnessy-heart-surgery/To see Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy on his morning “jog” through Newton is to know why he writes about sports rather than plays them. Slow is not exactly the word. Parents pushing triplets in strollers, a guy walking an elderly St. Bernard with orthopedic issues, they breeze by him like the winter wind.
It was during these jogs when Shaughnessy started feeling numbness in his elbows and pain in his chest. He called his doctor, who ordered tests, which led to something called an angiogram at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. When the cardiologist saw the results, he scheduled an emergency quadruple bypass surgery for the next morning and forbade Dan from leaving the hospital that night.
Spoiler alert: Dan, as many people have undoubtedly read, is recovering at home and slowly regaining his strength. That’s not what this is about.
What this is about is the 16 or so hours between when he was told he needed heart surgery and when he was wheeled into the OR. It was Tuesday, Feb. 6, and that stretch of time pretty much captures Dan to perfection, journalists in general, and the Globe more specifically. There’s nothing normal about it.
Keep in mind, Dan Shaughnessy has been covering sports for the Globe for more than 50 years. He wrote about the Red Sox when Carl Yastrzemski was playing left field. He was the Celtics beat reporter when Larry Bird was in his prime. Bobby Orr, Steve Grogan, Bill Buckner, Roger Clemens, he was there for them all. Ted Williams, when he was still with us, returned his calls, and Bob Cousy still does.
There’s an excellent argument to make that Shaughnessy is the closest thing to a household name as any columnist in the business, a status he’s achieved by combining his encyclopedic knowledge of Boston sports with a fearless need to speak for a truly rabid base of unusually knowledgeable fans. He is the most consistently read columnist at the Globe, often by people who have never agreed with a word he’s written. Full disclosure: As much as I like the guy, there have been more than a couple of times when I’ve dreamt in technicolor about my hands wrapped around his neck — but that’s an issue for another day, or never a day.
So someone might be forgiven for thinking that a 70-year-old columnist with 50 years behind him, a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, who is indisputably the most read person in the city, might feel secure enough to take the afternoon off when he’s been told his heart is basically functioning with the efficiency of the Red Line and he’s about to go into a multi-hour surgery that will determine the course and length of the rest of his life.
Think again. Dan hadn’t finished his “picked-up pieces” column for the coming weekend. He had it half-written, which almost made it worse, because no writer, especially no columnist, ever wants to have their words go unread. Plus, he hates missing a column — any column, for any reason.
So he reached out to his son with a pair of requests. Would he please bring his old man a meatball sub, and while he’s at it, bring his laptop from home as well.
The column was to begin with Theo Epstein’s recently announced return to the Red Sox organization as a minority owner of Fenway Sports Group and a senior adviser. Dan’s plan was to unravel Epstein’s goals and assess whether they met the vast expectations of so many Red Sox fans.
From his hospital bed, Dan texted Epstein to see if he would engage. Epstein responded to the effect of, maybe later, off the record.
Dan then gave him an excuse for the ages. He’d be undergoing quadruple bypass surgery in the morning, he wrote, and he didn’t know when he’d be able to talk.
That got Epstein’s attention. There was then a conversation between the patient and minority owner. There were email follow-ups into the night as Epstein sent some clarifying points.
“Dan,” Epstein began one email, “Let’s hope this isn’t the last thing you ever read. (If someone at the Globe is reading this email after Dan’s unfortunate demise, delete it.)”
Shaughnessy filed the column at 9:37 p.m. that night with a simple note attached: “Medical stuff the next few days so I am leaving this behind.”
The response from a sports editor at 9:04 the following morning, while Dan was in the throes of surgery, was as exquisitely brief: “In. Thanks, Dan.”
The column was published two days later, on Friday morning, under the headline, “Theo Epstein has been away a while but he knows how the Red Sox work, and other thoughts.” Dan was still in the intensive care unit of the hospital, barely conscious. No reader had any idea, even as the column was one of the most-read pieces on the site for days.
Welcome to our world. Welcome to our lives. The business model for journalism is in shambles, even as the Globe proves the exception to so much that has gone wrong. A former president and so many of his acolytes try mightily and constantly to undermine our work. And yet there’s a newsroom filled with committed writers and editors and so many others who see their work more as a mission than a job. Again, admittedly, it’s not all that normal, but it is typical.
There’s a phrase we have in this business that says you’re only as good as your last story. And Dan Shaughnessy, week after week, takes that to a bit of an extreme.
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Post by timholycross on Mar 4, 2024 17:29:32 GMT -5
Remember a couple of columns in which he said he ran exactly one mile, every day. Exactly one. Never (or hardly ever, I'm sure would be more correct) missed a day.
To each his/her own, there are things I like doing that accomplish the same thing. Lucky enough to still be able to do them, and Dan was lucky he could still do his routine.
I bet he'd have had this problem a long time ago if he wasn't doing anything.
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Post by longsuffering on Mar 4, 2024 21:15:48 GMT -5
Remember a couple of columns in which he said he ran exactly one mile, every day. Exactly one. Never (or hardly ever, I'm sure would be more correct) missed a day. To each his/her own, there are things I like doing that accomplish the same thing. Lucky enough to still be able to do them, and Dan was lucky he could still do his routine. I bet he'd have had this problem a long time ago if he wasn't doing anything. Brian O'Donovan, late host of "A Celtic Sojourn" on WGBH -FM ran several miles a day in Newton and was remarkably trim and fit yet died of cancer in his sixties. It's a mystery.
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on Mar 4, 2024 22:07:27 GMT -5
Jim Fixx, who wrote the best selling “The Complete Book of Running “ that helped start the running/jogging revolution in the 1970s, died of a heart attack while running at age 52.
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Post by mm67 on Mar 4, 2024 22:29:01 GMT -5
All these seemingly physically fit joggers dying at a young age! Yikes!
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Post by rgs318 on Mar 5, 2024 8:30:52 GMT -5
Jim Fixx, who wrote the best selling “The Complete Book of Running “ that helped start the running/jogging revolution in the 1970s, died of a heart attack while running at age 52. I remembered James Fixx and enjoyed his book. I also know that he had congenital heart problems and that if he had not been running, he quite probably would not have reached the age he did. Some of his doctors and friends said much the same thing.
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on Mar 5, 2024 9:03:36 GMT -5
Good observation-I did not mean to imply that his running killed him., I was just pointing out the irony of the situation.
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Post by Chu Chu on Mar 5, 2024 10:54:14 GMT -5
Jim Fixx, who wrote the best selling “The Complete Book of Running “ that helped start the running/jogging revolution in the 1970s, died of a heart attack while running at age 52. I remembered James Fixx and enjoyed his book. I also know that he had congenital heart problems and that if he had not been running, he quite probably would not have reached the age he did. Some of his doctors and friends said much the same thing. Not exactly. Jim Fix died of an acute myocardial infarction, and was found after his death to have severe arteriosclerosis of the three main coronary arteries. I also read and enjoyed his book. He was a great advocate for exercise as a major cure and preventive for cardiovascular disease, and believed he exercised at an elite level that he did not need to pay attention to other risk factors. It is important to get his story right, because I believe it contains lessons for the rest of us. He should've paid more attention to his prior history of cigarette smoking, and his family history of early heart disease, which might have indicated an underlying abnormality putting him at increased risk.
This article is by By Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., from the New York Times, was written a week after his death, July 24, 1984, Section C, Page 1:
THE first symptom of heart disease is sometimes sudden death. Never was that fact made clearer than in the ironic death last week of James Fixx, whose best-selling book ''The Complete Book of Running'' led tens of thousands to take up jogging and made him a guru of the running world. Mr. Fixx, whose transition from a heavy young man who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day into a trimmer, middle-aged nonsmoking athlete seemed to insure a healthy life, died at the age of 52 while jogging in Vermont.
Friends described him as being in fine physical condition and said he had not complained of any symptoms while running 10 miles a day and pursuing other vigorous physical activity. He had trounced his sister, Kitty Fixx Bower, in a tennis match on Cape Cod the day before his death.
His former wife, Alice Kasman Fixx, said, ''He never had any warning.''
''If he did,'' she said, ''he ignored it.''
Reports immediately after his death suggested that Mr. Fixx did not have a regular physician and had not gone for a routine checkup as his sister had urged him to do, even though his father had his first heart attack at the age of 35 and died of another one at 43.
News accounts of Mr. Fixx's death have led many to assume that such checkups would have detected the disease, brought about drug treatment or coronary bypass surgery, and saved his life. It might have.
But the insidious thing about heart disease, which is the nation's leading cause of death, is that it is often so secret and veiled that doctors cannot always detect severe cases such as Mr. Fixx's from routine tests. All individuals with heart disease are not candidates for bypass surgery, nor do all who have it benefit from it. It usually takes decades for arteriosclerosis to clog the arteries, thereby narrowing the stream of blood and reducing nourishment of the heart muscle. Further, as the painless, insidious process progresses, the body usually adapts to it by forming collateral pathways for blood to flow. Presumably, in Mr. Fixx's case, they were inadequate to protect against the heart rhythm abnormality that apparently killed him - an abnormality that may or may not have been triggered by a heart attack.
Dr. Eleanor N. McQuillen, Vermont's chief medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Mr. Fixx, said in an interview that all three of his coronary arteries were damaged by arteriosclerosis, the underlying cause of heart attacks.
Mr. Fixx's left circumflex coronary artery was almost totally blocked; only trickles of blood could flow through the pinholes that were left of the inside of that artery. About 80 percent of the blood flow in the right coronary artery was blocked. The chief nourishment to Mr. Fixx's heart came from blood flowing through the third artery, the left anterior descending, which was less severely affected. Nevertheless, half that artery was blocked in places.
There was additional arteriosclerotic damage to a portion of Mr. Fixx's aorta and the arteries in his legs, but no blockage. The disease spared the arteries that fed his brain.
Mr. Fixx's case ''will be a big question raiser'' because of the irony of his death while jogging and the debate about the health benefits of exercise, said Dr. Robert S. Ascheim, a cardiologist who practices at 435 East 57th Street and teaches at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.
''Does running benefit you? Nobody really has a clear answer,'' Dr. Ascheim said.
Nevertheless, many people believe exercise prevents death from premature heart disease. Dr. Ascheim said that the severity of Mr. Fixx's heart disease would not have made bypass surgery imperative but that national studies have shown that medications would have been advised.
As the debates go on, optimists will say that exercise prolonged Mr. Fixx's life, and pessimists will contend that it shortened it.
Because of the uncertainties, one of the thorniest questions physicians face is how many tests and which ones to advise to screen for heart disease in middle-aged males who have no symptoms. Many physicians would not have been particularly suspicious of Mr. Fixx's having heart disease because he was in such fine physical condition and because of the apparent absence of symptoms even when exercising strenuously.
A physician examining him would start with a medical history, asking such questions as whether the patient has felt pain in the chest, jaw, throat or arm in relationship to exercise. He would ask the patient to describe the character of the pain and to tell how long it has been present. Newly occurring pain might merit special attention.
On learning that 17 years had passed since Mr. Fixx stopped his two-pack-a-day smoking habit and began running, the physician would have assumed that his risk of a heart attack would have returned to that of a nonsmoker. However, the physician would be struck by the heart disease history of Mr. Fixx's father.
If Mr. Fixx's blood pressure was high, appropriate therapy would have been advised.
Mr. Fixx's heart, like those of many athletes, was enlarged, and it probably would have appeared so on a chest X-ray. But, as Dr. McQuillen said, ''it is hard to know what the significance of an enlarged heart is in a runner'' who had serious heart disease.
Chances are that the electrocardiogram would have been normal because blockage of the arteries does not show up in the test, which detects only abnormal heart beats and damage that has already occurred to the heart muscle itself. Evidence of a painless heart attack sometime in the past, if present on the electrocardiogram, would have been a clue to the severity of his problem. However, if it was a heart attack that killed Mr. Fixx, it was apparently his first. Dr. McQuillen said she would study specimens of Mr. Fixx's heart under the microscope for evidence of an old heart attack.
Doctors are reluctant to resort to tests involving injection of needles, tubes and chemicals because of the associated risks. They usually order such tests only if there is evidence of medical need. So most doctors would not advise special X-ray tests known as coronary angiograms unless they had strong clues to the presence of heart disease.
The advanced equipment needed to screen for heart disease in symptomless individuals is very expensive. Moreover, all medical tests sometimes fail to detect a condition when it is present and indicate it is there when it is not. The percentage of such so-called false negatives and false positives varies with each test. For those and other reasons, most doctors are not inclined to advise use of currently available technology to mass screen for heart disease.
Particularly because of Mr. Fixx's family history of heart disease, many doctors might have advised a simpler screening test called the treadmill, or exercise stress test, which costs about $175. But many other doctors might not have done it.
Even if Mr. Fixx had a stress test, his endurance might have been supernormal because of his training. Yet changes may have shown up in the so- called ST segments of the electrocardiogram. In equivocal cases, ''many doctors might ignore the changes if he had no pain at the time,'' said Dr. J. Ward Kennedy, chief cardiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
If the results of the exercise stress test were normal, most doctors would have stopped the search. However, if the exercise stress results were abnormal, many doctors would have ordered tests that rely on radio-isotopes to outline the heart muscle. Some use thallium, and such tests cost about $750. Presumably, Mr. Fixx's results would have been abnormal. Because of the expense and because there are false negatives, such tests are generally not done as a first option.
Many will be struck by the irony of the jogger dying while striving for physical fitness. But as Dr. Kennedy put it, arteriosclerosis is ''a very complicated disease and practically anything can happen.'' Mr. Fixx's death is a reminder of how much more needs to be learned before heart disease can be conquered.
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Post by newfieguy74 on Mar 5, 2024 11:09:02 GMT -5
It's tricky. A few years ago, although healthy, I requested a calcium scoring test because of a family history of heart disease. The result was over 1,000--very high. I now see a cardiologist regularly and continue to run (I've run about 180 races, including two marathons). I take comfort having a plan with my doctor.
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Post by timholycross on Mar 10, 2024 9:47:30 GMT -5
I had a stress test then the "nuclear" one a few weeks later.
Nothing on either one that sticks out. Either that or the cardiologist is so swamped that he couldn't push up my appointment which a good 2 months after the tests.
My exercise routine seems to be going well. But, channeling my inner Yogi Berra, "you never know".
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