Re: Personality changes and heart bypass surgery?

My husband just recently died 2 years after his bypass. His behaviors, in hindsight, really started after his first angioplasty two years prior to the bypass.

He had had so many horrible procedures, all deadly in the long run to him. Lots of radiation tests and procedures done. The first angioplasty he could feel it going into his heart-it hurt him and caused him to cough.

My husband got so paranoid, so aggressive with me that I started asking other wives if they had heard of bypasses causing this. I've heard so many stories from so many people that their family members all had great personality changes and none of them for the better.

Aggression, hyper emotions, rage, paranoia about those of most help and care to them, sneaky games of control.

The cardiac doctors I spoke to about this acted like they had never heard about an emotional/psychological side effect to the physical surgery.

I researched it online as my husband's behaviors escalated to the degree that he started plotting with others to kill me, get me out of the picture so he could develop our property. Making deals with insidious people who came out of the woodwork to take advantage of this pitifully crazy sick man. He was on oxygen and got so worked up he'd be doing 2 or 3 lines of maximum (5 liters) of O2 at a time.

I had his exited from our home on a civil protection order as his behaviors got worse, at first weekly, then it was daily then hourly. He never forgave me for that but I really felt our lives at home were truly threatened by him and NOBODY would do a thing to help me.

Our last two years of our lives together were totally horrible and so destructive. The 'real' him was such a minority of his life by the time he started failing from congestive heart failure. He was 50 when he started getting clogged up, 52 when he had his bypass and 54 when he passed away in January.

He was also on Plavix for about 3 and a half years. That caused 2 ulcers on his esophagus and one in his stomach causing him to almost bleed to death. He also had bad reactions to every drug he was on, including a psychotic reaction to Ativan.

In his case the doctors at Kaiser were very blase about any psychological/emotional stresses their treatments caused a hard working control freak of a man. I had told them he was of course very depressed, very frightened of dying, very troubled with the 'why him' having so many horrible physical problems. They had no counseling, no treatments except for pushing meds which he had life threatening reactions to.

Again, once I started telling my story to a lot of people did I hear the stories of others whose family members were 'never the same' after bypass and I believe all those who suffered like this did not live more than 3 years after their bypasses.

I have known several people who had bypasses or several bypasses and they did live a long time but never asked if they had any personality changes or negative behavior problems.

I have read somewhere in my research that the heart/lung machine used with bypasses were a possible cause of brain damage that could result in personality changes and that they were working on eliminating that particular equipment with bypass patients.

I did not know what was wrong with my husband except that he was not the same man before his bypass. Like he became soulless after they 'cracked his sternum and held his heart in stranger's hands'.

I have read the many stories about heart transplant survivors, the heart is a seat of our soul imo. Tweet