After several back and forths with my DC cardiologist, I've settled on returning to DC for the follow-up catheterization to my episode of 1 August. It wasn't necessarily my first choice. While we've got lots of friends in DC and still have a house there, the house has been staged with the real estate agent's furniture so I'm not sure we can stay there. Also, my parents had made it clear that they wanted to be present for this procedure; they weren't able to be there for the one I had in 2004 because that was scheduled so quickly. To me, it made more sense to go to Houston where we could have stayed with Jill's parents and had the procedure performed at St. Luke's, one of the top cardiac centers in the country. But the DC cardiologist wouldn't (or couldn't) provide a referral or a recommendation for a doctor in Houston, and my own attempt to contact St. Luke's to find a physician left me without any warm fuzzies. Given that I had been seeing the DC cardiologist for the last 4 years, so he knew my history and had all my records, I decided to go with him after all. I thought we might handle the procedure at the Washington Hospital Center, where I had undergone the cath before, but I'll be going to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. I checked them out online and was happy to see that their cardiac unit seems quite modern and even has some kind of partnership with NIH. I especially liked this report on how they had been a part of a study on whether clot-dissolving drugs are better or worse than traditional angioplasty/stents, which mirrors the choices in my own care. My belief on surgery is you go to a place that does it a lot (if you have the luxury of choice).

So it looks like I'll be in Washington, DC on the 24th for a follow-up consultation with the cardiologist, to talk over what we might see from the cath and our options on what to do depending on how my triple-vessel disease has progressed, to be followed the next day with the procedure in the afternoon. He's told me to expect to not be able to travel for at least three days afterwards, so I'm setting my fully refundable/changeable plane ticket for a Tuesday, 30 September departure. I'm setting up some work meetings that sandwich this, since it makes some sense to try and get some things done while I'm back in the States, although that won't be my first priority on this trip.