I am someone who has four medicated stents, and I am not sure what to say about Dale’s post. It is easy to give out another “Big Pharma” conspiracy theory when you are not lying on a table in a lab, and the doctor is making a decision on whether to send you to the OR for open heart surgery, or to put stents in you.

I am very thankful that my doctor — who is from India, by the way — decided that he could unblock a bunch of my arteries without having to saw open my chest. (I guess if a number of nativists had their way, we would have no cardiology practice where I live and I would have been tossed into an ambulance and driven 150 miles east to Baltimore. Gee, I would have been SO much better off if I had the privilege of driving 150 miles one way to a 10-minute cardiologist appointment.)

While the discussions about Big Pharma on this page are abstract, I have to live these issues all the time. Since my “surgery,” I no longer have the chest pains I had regularly before then, and I am able to do a full slate of exercises. And while I was not blessed with the wisdom of being able to tell my cardiologist everything he needed to know while I lay on the table, I am thankful that I am alive and pretty darned healthy.

I say this not because I think Dale and the others necessarily are wrong, but that when one literally is facing death, there are times when real-live decisions must be made. Should have I told the doctor to bug off and then go take chelation tablets? I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that I am alive and doing well. Maybe my cardiologist does not know what he is doing, but I am glad he is in town.