And I didn't use ONE swear word! Honest! I didn't! 
Stay Strong,
Fuzzy122
Posted on 09/06/2004 1:49:37 PM PDT by jimboster
Clinton to undergo bypass surgery for artery blockages
By Seth Borenstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Former President Bill Clinton, whose appetite for fast food and fluctuating waistline cemented his pudgy persona with the public, will undergo heart bypass surgery as early as Saturday in a New York hospital because of heavy blockages of his arteries.
Clinton's prospects are good for a full recovery from a surgery that's performed on more than 300,000 people each year with a 97.6 percent survival rate. The several hours of surgery will involve taking other arteries or veins and rerouting blood away from blocked areas and into the heart.
Clinton, 58, who suffered "mild chest pain and shortness of breath" Thursday afternoon, went to Northern Westchester Hospital and, after tests, was sent home later that night, according to a statement from the former president's office in Harlem. After more tests at Westchester on Friday morning, Clinton was transferred to New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan for upcoming surgery.
"He's in excellent hands and he's at one of the great hospitals in the world," his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said Friday at the New York State Fair in Syracuse as she left to be with the former president and their daughter Chelsea at the hospital.
The hospital and the former president's office aren't releasing details of the surgery, which reportedly is being planned as a quadruple bypass.
The former president is relatively young for the surgery, experts said, which means he has a better than average chance of undergoing surgery without complications and resuming a normal life. More than half of the nation's bypass surgeries are performed on people 65 and older.
"Once you get the grafts on you, you're good to go. Essentially you've got a re-load on the shotgun," said Dr. Randolph Chitwood, the chief of cardiothoracic surgery at East Carolina University's School of Medicine, who underwent bypass surgery when he was 47. "I consider I was recharged and ready to go again."
The surgery is much like installing new plumbing, Chitwood said. It involves putting inch-long patches of arteries or veins from elsewhere - legs, arms or elsewhere in the chest - around the blockages. Most of the time, the patient's heart is stopped during the operation, but for patients older than Clinton is, doctors sometimes do the surgery while the heart continues to beat, Chitwood said.
The procedure is relatively rare for men Clinton's age. Only 5 of 1,000 men aged 45 to 64 had bypass surgery in 2001, according to statistics kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On average, the surgery cost about $61,000 in 2001. The government pays ex-presidents' medical bills.
Bypass surgery generally isn't done unless 75 percent of an artery is blocked, said Dr. George Sopko, a cardiologist at the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md.
The fact that the surgery is scheduled and not done on an emergency basis is a good sign, said Dr. Luca Vricella, a cardiac surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
However, Vricella said the fact that Clinton is getting bypass surgery instead of less invasive procedures - angioplasty or stents such as Vice President Dick Cheney - means the blockage is too extensive or too complicated to be fixed with stents or a balloon inserted through arteries.
"Quadruple bypass means you have a multiple vessel disease, a pretty advanced disease," Sopko told Knight Ridder.
A number of factors, including weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and genetics, cause arterial blockages, the doctors said.
Clinton in January 2001 was put on a cholesterol-lowering prescription because of elevated "bad" cholesterol of 177, up from 134, Dr. Connie Mariano, the president's personal physician, told reporters in a briefing three-and-a-half years ago. Recent studies indicate ideally that number should be in the 60-to-70 range, Sopko said Friday.
Mariano said she talked to Clinton about his cholesterol levels and said the president "acknowledges that it's a combination of not the right type of diet, food that's on the road and long hours, and also not enough exercise."
Clinton, who's lost weight since he left the White House, often talked about being on the trendy South Beach Diet. But on Wednesday, the former president was seen in New Orleans eating gumbo, catfish, black-eyed peas and fried beignets - fried sugared donuts - during his book tour.
Chitwood said he doubted that weight was an issue for Clinton's artery disease.
"I don't think the president is really obese, he's kind of chunky," Chitwood said.
Clinton left office weighing 214 pounds, which is considered overweight for someone 6-foot, 2-inches tall, according to the federal government.
Both President Bush and his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, wished the former president well during campaign appearances. Some in Bush's audience booed when he wished Clinton well, while those in Kerry's cheered.
Check this out.
E-mail Seth at sborenstein@krwashington.com
I did start a thread mentioning the Knight Ridder article on Friday. I know some were going to contact them, but I don't know if there had been a retraction or not.
I just sent off an email to Seth...
This is all the poor slobs have.
Evil Republicans boo sickly clinton
Bush snorts coke
Laura experimented with cannabis in her youth
And then the democrats go on TV and preach against the politics of personal destruction.
Link to the corporate officials...
http://www.knightridder.com/digital/contact.html
And a link on how to contact them...
If you go to the web page, you will see that this story is dated September 3rd. So, it doesn't look like this reporter is repeating the lie---only that it wasn't corrected on the webpage.
Good catch. Red alert off!
Oh, then it ok.
Thanks...e-mail sent.
Borenstein or Knight Ridder hasn't corrected the story.
Which should make one wonder why K-R couldn't be bothered to correct the lie on that web page.
If you do a Google News search for "Bush Boo Clinton" you will find at least two other news sources which have not corrected this story. I wrote to them.
What do I say after Dear Prick?
Now why do I think that if something like this had happened to a Kerry story, heads would've rolled and corrections would have been immediate?
fired off my email to this jerk and also to the AP people.
And I didn't use ONE swear word! Honest! I didn't!
Stay Strong,
Fuzzy122
This caught my eye-- remembering back to a political zing that Hillary took a couple of days ago:
She praised the hospital's medical staff and said: "We're delighted we have good health insurance. That makes a big difference. And I hope someday everybody will be able to say the same thing." (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1207179/posts)
Talk about taking advantage of a situation for personal or political gain! ...especially as it's not really true in this case: it sounds like this is more of a perk than an insurance policy.
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