I’ve been in Mumbai for 80 hours and spent most of that here in the Hiranandani Hospital. I’d been having what I thought was some heartburn for a couple of weeks. However, Friday morning about 3 am I woke up with pretty severe chest pain. The pain subsided somewhat and would go in cycles. We spent the day sightseeing in southern Mumbai. We visited the laundry (an unbelievable operation), the Gate of India, and the Taj Hotel (where a serious terrorist attack happened a few years ago). The pain continued throughout the day. After we got back to the apartment I told my daughter that, if I were in the states, I would go to the urgent care to see what was wrong.

We went to the emergency room. It didn’t take long for the cardiologist to tell me that what I was experiencing was severe angina and that I was headed up to the Cath Lab for an angiogram. That revealed several arterial blockages in my heart, a few of them with greater than 80% blockage. I was going to have angioplasty.

Sunday mid-day I was off once again to the Cath Lab for the procedure which took just over 90 minutes. Four stents were inserted, two of them in very tricky places. Two blockages remain, but they are less than 50% and empirical data suggests that a stent can cause more harm than good in that case. So, these will be managed through medication and lifestyle changes.

It’s now just after 7 am Tuesday morning in Mumbai. The cardiologist will be here about 9 am when I expect to be discharged. Then the rest of the paperwork will be required and by early afternoon I should be out of here with a renewed lease on life.

So, how is it being in a major hospital in Mumbai?

First, the care has been first class. Amazingly good care. The staff is well trained, very friendly, and very professional. The cardiologist and the surgeon were excellent. The facility is very modern. And the price is significantly less than it would have been back home.

Fortunately, I bought travel insurance when I arranged the flights. The reason at the time was that we had a very short connection in Amsterdam, one hour and ten minutes, and I thought we needed at least baggage insurance and missed flight insurance. While some of that may be needed on the way home, the $25,000 medical coverage is a godsend. The total price will be around $10,000 (when I’m finally discharged, the final price will be known), inclusive of hospital, laboratory, and doctors. (Update: total bill came to right at $14,000. It’s all on a credit card waiting on reimbursement from the travel insurance.)

The food, however, is very problematic. I haven’t been able to stomach much of it. Breakfast on Sunday was a strange porridge and two pieces of bread with some kind of jam in between. Lunch and dinner were mystery foods that I just couldn’t eat. I was able to ask for corn flakes and milk for breakfast on Monday, but it came with hot milk! I was hungry enough that it was all consumed.

In between breakfast and lunch comes some kind of a soup. I’ve been able to get down a couple of them and a couple of others were not palatable. Last night dinner was fried rice and finally something edible. Since I’m on a no-salt, no fat diet, I’m pretty sure that is why the food is so strange. Breakfast this morning, however, rocked. Corn flakes with cold milk and an omelet!

I’m on several medications. But they don’t do them all at once. Every couple of hours the nurse comes by and I get another tablet. They don’t do them all at once because there might be an interaction. But what that means is that I get awakened twice during the night to take a pill. For example, I am on 10mg of Hytrin (generic name: terazosin). They don’t have it in a 10mg size, so I get 5 two-milligram tablets, but not all at once. I get one 2mg tablet every four hours.

At 5:30 am they change the bed linens (even though I was being discharged today, they insisted that the linen had to be changed this morning). I was in ICU from Saturday evening through Monday afternoon, so Sunday and Monday mornings at 5:30 the bed was changed and I got a sponge bath, a Very Thorough sponge bath. Breakfast comes at 7:30 am, so there’s a two-hour wait. Blood draws happen in the middle of the night. My blood sugar was tested every four hours in the ICU and the blood pressure machine did its routine every fifteen minutes until Monday mid-day when the schedule was changed to once an hour. It is difficult to get more than two hours of sleep at a time. I’m so looking forward to sleeping all night with no interruptions!

I moved into a private room on Monday afternoon. This is a huge room. If I wanted, I could have been in a suite where Nina would have a bed available (at a higher price … this single room is included in the “angioplasty package”). It has a desk, a couch, two chairs, a large picture window, and a nice bathroom. But the same routine for medications and bed linen changes. The nurse was here at 5:30 to change the bed and give me a pill followed by instructions to take a shower.

At 9 am the cardiologist came in, did one last check, and signed the discharge paperwork. If there is anything to know about India is that there is paperwork for EVERYTHING, each requiring stamps from several people (It is said that the British brought bureaucracy to India and the Indians perfected it). The discharge process took a couple of hours, mostly because we kept getting different instructions as to where we needed to go.

Everything at the hospital is recorded on paper. Someone somewhere else then transfers the info into a computer. Upon discharge I got a thick file with all the test results, the EKG printouts, and CD’s with the video of the angiogram, the angioplasty, and the echocardiogram. That was a very impressive binder of information. Apparently in India, your health information belongs to you, not to the doctor or the hospital. That’s the way it should be in the US.

It’s now 2:10 pm on Tuesday, January 13th. That would be 3:40 am Tuesday morning in New York and 1:40 am in Salt Lake City. I feel great.

Now, I can finally take another look at Mumbai.

Very thankful today.