Fun with AI

I am glad that AI wasn't around when Jenny was ill. I would have asked for every permutation and possible outcome. I know this because since I woke up early this morning, I was giving AI excerpts of my recent exploration--the stress test, the echocardiogram, and family history (uncle dead at 66 from an MI, my dad dead of a stroke at 48). It's cheery stuff. I just want to know what to expect. Here is my favorite AI's response:

Before adding family history, based on everything you told me, I estimated roughly:

• CABG: ~55–70%

• Stents: ~20–35%

• Meds only: ~5–10%

With strong family history of early and severe vascular disease, I’d nudge that further to something like:

• CABG recommended: ~60–75%

• More stents: ~15–30%

• Meds only: ~5–10%

Why not 90%+? Because:

• If the cath shows one clear focal culprit lesion and the rest is moderate/stable, they may still reasonably stent that.

• Anatomy still rules.

But your family history makes it much less likely they’ll say:

“Let’s just keep patching this with more stents forever.”

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I am not going to lie, I was hoping for the odds to be lower, but expected the news to actually match the data. It didn't disappoint my expectations, only my hope. I am having a terrible time trying to focus on work, thinking about the rest of the week and the possible permutations of Thursday morning. 

I can't decide if I am more concerned about getting stents, when it is shown that diabetics do better and survive far longer with CABG--bypass surgery rather than with angioplasty and stents. 

I completed a new advanced direction, and will try and have my POA for medical decisions executed and notarized
tomorrow. I will ask my sister to make the decisions, should it come to that, to avoid any stress from the decision or disagreement between the girls. Also, what a terrible place to put the girls. They are too young. When I made these decisions for my mom, I lived with the guilt thereafter. This was despite it being the doctor recommended (multiple doctors-a whole interdisciplinary team). While the odds of my demise are low, post surgery the number one cause of death a year out is myocardial infarction. So, having all of this in place at this time is not just prophylactic, but pragmatic. 

My dad was, my mother told me as a kid a few times, a textbook example of being kept alive by a machine for an extraordinarily long time after brain death--six months post-stroke. There was never a time I remember when she wasn't fighting back tears telling me how she had begged and pleaded to have him unplugged. We talked about it a lot when I was a bit older, when the parents of Karen Ann Quinland, a woman in a long-term persistent vegetative state engaged in a heartbreaking fight to have her disconnected to allow her to die rather than linger on in that hell limbo. I don't want to be on a machine, unless I can come back as a communist Robocop with fabulous taste in all things, and a button that makes any atm dispense all its cash to me sans PIN or bank account. 

I am sitting on my couch, paralyzed with contemplation, well, its an admixture with fear and regret and concern for my children and dog. Time for work.