As the dispute escalates in its second week, neither party from the alternative government offered a commitment to give the nurses their 10.5pc pay rise and a 35-hour week, if they got into power.
The Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) plans to capitalise on the Government's dipping popularity by targeting vulnerable seats in the general election.
The main opposition parties have been less than clear until now on their attitude to the nurses' demands. However, Fine Gael and Labour both gave a firm 'no' when asked for a straight answer on whether they would give in to the nurses' demands if they gain power in the general election.
The two parties were responding to a question from the Irish Independent: "Will your party give nurses a 10.5pc pay rise and/or a 35-hour working week if in government after the general election?"
A spokesperson, in response to the question, said: "No, it would be wrong for an opposition party to make such a blanket promise and I don't believe the nurses expect such a promise from any party.
That party's spokesperson, responding to the question, said: "No, it's not for any political party to give taxpayers' money to any category of workers.
"Rather, there should be a health forum where badly needed changes in the hospital service are agreed in return for which the 35-hour week is phased in. Any pay issues should be resolved within the agreed machinery."
"We believe the National Implementation Body should give a clear starting for the introduction of a 35-hour week for nurses. If this were done we believe the INO and PNA would find it easier to accept the benchmarking process in relation to proposed pay increases."
He said: "Let me send a clear message of support and solidarity to the nurses. Sinn Fein supports you in your efforts to secure decent terms and conditions.
Fine Gael's health spokesman Dr Liam Twomey called on Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Health Minister Mary Harney to intervene in the dispute before this week's planned work stoppages.
The survey was carried out by the Irish National Teachers Organisation, whose general secretary John Carr said: "This means that for every €2 the state pays, parents have to pay an additional one euro."
Schools make up the shortfall through voluntary subscriptions, charity walks, readathons, race nights, golf classics, social evenings for parents, raffles, cake sales, sales of work, book sales, school lotto, Christmas Concerts and school plays or shows.
Although Education Minister Mary Hanafin has increased the capitation grant per pupil and given extra supports to disadvantaged schools, the study showed the increases did not match rising expenditure on day-to-day running costs. The survey was carried out during February and was based on school accounts for the calendar year 2006. Last year the average running costs per child were €216. But state funding amounted to just €145, leaving a shortfall of €71.
One Dublin school received just over €70,000 from the Department of Education to meet running costs. The expenses for the same period were more than €100,000.
Another school in the south of the country requests a voluntary contribution from parents of €100. Most of the school's 200 families contribute and last year this raised €17,500.
"If we were a business we would have had to shut down by Easter and close the doors. We are lucky that parents in this area can afford to subsidise the school like this," she said. "Many schools could not do what we do."
"There must be real increases for schools," he added, and called for a doubling of the grant to primary schools to match what was being paid to second-level schools.
She said that at both primary and second-level, the 2007 Estimates provided for increases in capitation funding well above the rate of inflation.
"This means that every primary school is getting €163.58 per pupil to cover expenses such as heating, lighting and insurance - compared with just €57 per pupil in 1997," added the minister.
The Philip Lynch investment vehicle One51 and the Doyle Group, a Cork shipping company, have now almost doubled their stake in the Irish Ferries operator, holding 17.5-18 per cent of the company.
One51 and the Doyle Group have now spent more than €90 million in building up their stake in ICG, following the consortium's €43 million outlay on 9 per cent of the company shares on Thursday. It purchased the shares from a number of hedge funds.
The consortium cannot make a lower offer than the highest amount they have paid for shares, meaning the lowest offer in any possible bid has edged further ahead of the rival management-led offer of €18.50 a share.
At a minimum of €2 per share more than the management buyout offer tabled by ICG chief executive Éamonn Rothwell and his colleagues, with the backing of AIB, any counter-bid by the One51 consortium to take the company private is set to prove more attractive to ICG shareholders.
Shareholders are due to vote on the management offer at meetings in Dublin on April 12th. However, the independent directors of ICG said last week that these meetings would be adjourned.
The independent directors, John McGuckian, Peter Crowley and Bernard Somers, also said they had held initial talks with the One51 consortium regarding its proposed offer.
The directors are likely to seek further meetings with One51 and the Doyle Group to clarify a statement the consortium issued last Wednesday indicating that it was "in discussions regarding a possible offer to acquire the entire issued, and to be issued, share capital of ICG".
The statement said the possible offer would be at a level of "not less than €20 per ICG unit", with each unit comprising one ordinary share and three redeemable preference shares.
Having now spent an estimated €92.3 million on ICG shares at prices above €18.50, the One51 consortium will oppose the Aella bid and is in a strong position to block it.
ICG shareholders have seen their shares rise significantly in value since Mr Rothwell and his management buyout team launched their bid for the shipping company on March 8th.
The company's share price has climbed from €15.60 on March 7th to a closing price of €20.25 before the Easter break, a gain of almost 30 per cent.
Staunton says that shaken by fears of a recession driven by falling house prices, Wall Street last week gasped with relief at news from the US National Association of Realtors that contracts to buy existing homes rose 0.7 per cent in February.
The tiny increase was an improvement on a 4.2 per cent month-on-month fall in January but it did little to obscure the big picture represented in the fact that the number of existing homes sold in February was 8.5 per cent lower than 12 months ago.
Fears about the US housing market were reinforced by the filing for bankruptcy of New Century Financial, one of America's biggest providers of "subprime" home loans to borrowers with poor credit histories. New Century's fall is part of a broader crisis in the subprime mortgage market, which has seen delinquencies and foreclosures soar.
Investors and economic analysts are worried that the subprime crisis will affect an already softening housing market in the US that is already having an impact on consumer spending as Americans stop dipping into their home equity to fund big purchases such as cars.
The rise and fall of the subprime market reflect a boom in home ownership over the last decade that started when the Clinton administration introduced a number of initiatives to make it easier for more people to get home loans.
Democrats and Republicans alike believed that home ownership was the best route to wealth accumulation for most citizens and studies showed that it also helped to reduce crime and increase civic engagement.
Mortgage firms introduced an array of new loan options, including low "teaser" interest rates that increased sharply after a few years, interest-only mortgages and 50-year repayment terms to reduce monthly payments.
Borrowers with poor credit histories were now able to secure mortgages for the first time and lenders found increasingly ingenious ways to make monthly payments appear more affordable. These included dispensing with escrow accounts that most conventional mortgages set up to collect money for property tax and home insurance premiums.
As long as house prices were climbing, few borrowers got into trouble and home ownership in the US increased from 65 per cent of the total population in 1996 to 69 per cent last year.
As house prices began to stagnate and in some parts of the country, to fall, more and more subprime borrowers had difficulty meeting monthly repayments and the current wave of foreclosures is forcing as many as 130,000 Americans from their homes each month.
All these repossessed homes are depressing prices in many parts of the US and Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada, the chief beneficiaries of the housing boom, are bracing for a harsh blow from the slump. From late 2005 to late 2006, existing home sales fell by 21 per cent in California, 27 per cent in Arizona, 31 per cent in Florida and 36 per cent in Nevada.
US unemployment fell to a five-year low of 4.4 per cent, suggesting that troubles in the housing market have yet to hit the broader economy but economists warn that the effect may only be delayed rather than averted. Real wages in the US have scarcely budged in recent years and consumer spending has been fuelled by home equity.
Car dealerships in Florida and California are already complaining about a fall-off in business and many are blaming the fact that 16 per cent of car buyers in Florida and 30 per cent in California finance their purchases by borrowing against their homes.
These worrying trends are appearing amid signs that the golden years of high economic growth and low inflation in the US may be coming to an end after almost a decade. Economic growth has fallen to about 2.3 per cent of GDP from 3.7 per cent the previous year but inflation remains stubbornly above 2 per cent and is trending upwards.
Part of the problem is a slowdown in productivity growth, which is close to a 10-year low. The weakness of the dollar against other currencies has pushed up the price of imports and any rise in fuel costs could drive inflation even higher.
The Federal Reserve has held back from cutting interest rates from their current level of 5.25 per cent, depriving America's beleaguered homeowners of a little relief in these anxious times.
But rank-and-file gardaí complain it is slow, at times inefficient as well as antiquated. However, Justice Minister Michael McDowell vehemently denies there are serious “tweaking” issues with the crime recording system.
“Significant investment has been made to improve the availability and response times of the system and I am advised that as a result, over the course of the past year, there has been no unplanned downtime of the system,” he said.
“The Government has a dreadful record of waste in relation to modern technology. This is another chapter in the waste of information technology, on top of the e-voting and PPARS systems,” he said.
The garda rank-and-file chief representative said there were still “black spots” around the country where PULSE was not operational, such as in Mayo.
ITS introduction in 2001 at a cost of more than €60m saw gardaí pledge to boycott it. Agreement was reached after a special package was finalised. n Judge Catherine Murphy told the Dublin Children's Court in 2002 she was losing confidence in the computer system.
In 2005, Judge John Neilan told Mullingar District Court that gardaí had to resort to hand-written documents due to problems with PULSE causing a backlog in cases.
In 2003 the Garda Representative Association said the system was hampering gardaí in their work and forcing them to spend hours at their desks instead of on patrol as the system was much slower than had been anticipated and it frequently crashed.
Nout Wellink, president of the Dutch central bank, told the Financial Times that the regulator would not object in principle to a bid from a foreign group that wanted to buy ABN Amro in order to break it up.
His comments are likely to be scrutinised by European banks with an interest in ABN Amro, which is in exclusive talks about a takeover by UK group Barclays .
While Barclays is expected to keep ABN's operations largely intact, investment bankers and analysts believe rivals such as Royal Bank of Scotland could justify paying a higher price for ABN Amro if they sold its operations in Brazil and Italy to others, such as Santander of Spain.
The regulator has been under close scrutiny since Mr Wellink told a Dutch newspaper in February that calls by The Children's Investment Fund, the activist hedge fund, for a break-up of ABN Amro were “a bridge too far”.
Though his comments were specifically related to suggestions that the bank should sell off its most profitable parts and return the proceeds to shareholders, they were widely interpreted as a warning to unwanted foreign bidders.
Barclays and ABN Amro are finalising a deal that would create a banking behemoth with a market capitalisation of around $175bn. They have said the combined bank would be listed in London but have its headquarters in Amsterdam.
The merged bank is also expected to have DNB as its lead regulator, with the UK's Financial Services Authority keeping tabs on its retail banking and investment banking operations in the UK.
He mentioned Fortis, the Belgo-Dutch bank and insurance group, as a case of “very close co-operation between two regulators” – the Dutch central bank and the Belgian Banking Finance and Insurance Commission.
While a Barclays-ABN tie-up would differ, the example of close co-operation would be one that regulators would seek to emulate, Mr Wellink suggested.
Enders Analysis, the media research company, predicts that overall music sales by 2009 will be half their level at the peak of the CD boom. Global music sales are forecast to fall to $23bn in 2009, down 16 per cent from last year and far below the peak of $45bn in 1997, according to Enders.
Enders blames the industry's ills on continuing effects of digital technology, which allows consumers to store large quantities of music on computers, and to cherry-pick tracks, rather than buying albums. Rising broadband penetration has also made legal and illegal music downloading easier.
Music industry executives had hoped that rising revenues from legal digital download services, such as Apple 's iTunes store, would be sufficient to compensate for the fall in CD sales, but they have already had to postpone their predictions of when the market might stabilise several times.
The decline in CD sales is likely to force further cost cutting at some of the major music labels. The forecasts suggest lean times ahead for specialist music retailers. Tower Records in the US went bankrupt last year. In March, HMV in the UK issued its second profits warning in four months while predicting physical music sales in the UK would decline in value by 26 per cent in the next three years.
There has been little good news coming out of the music industry over the past few months. A 20 per cent decline in CD sales in the first seven weeks of the year forced EMI in February to cut its earnings forecasts for a second time in just over a month. The industry has suffered from the fragmentation of the CD album as consumers buy a few individual tracks online rather than entire albums.
Music executives welcomed news from Apple and EMI earlier this month that it would try to drive stronger sales of online albums. Although higher quality, copyright-protection-free songs from the EMI catalogue will cost about 30 cents more per download under the Apple-EMI agreement, this premium does not apply to entire albums. This could, say some analysts, encourage consumers to buy albums digitally.
¶Ray R. Irani, Occidental Petroleum's chairman and chief executive, is so far the highest paid corporate chief whose compensation package was tallied under the new rules. His total pay was about $52.1 million last year, according to an analysis by Equilar, the executive compensation research firm. But that was just the amount that Occidental's board awarded him last year.
In fact, he took home a lot more. First, there was the $270.1 million in profit from stock options he cashed out in 2006. Then there was the $93.3 million that Mr. Irani withdrew from a huge deferred stock plan that was revealed for the first time this year under the new rules.
According to its proxy statement, the company ended the program late last year in light of the substantial “liability and expense” of the program.
Of course, Mr. Irani can expect even more money down the road. Besides his annual pay, he still can tap at least four other deferred compensation plans, totaling at least $124 million.
¶International Business Machines will freeze this year an executive retention plan that helped bolster retirement benefits for Samuel J. Palmisano, its chairman and chief executive, to more than $33 million. On top of his $18.8 million pension, Mr. Palmisano is eligible to collect about $14.2 million through a special retention plan.
I.B.M. closed the program in 2004 for new participants, and said that by the end of the year, it would freeze the payments earned by any existing managers. An I.B.M spokesman could not be reached for comment about the timing.
¶Buried in the proxy of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer were details about more than the money it pays its board members and top executives. The company also took the unusual step of disclosing its independent compensation consultant's compensation.
“The total amount of fees paid to Frederic W. Cook & Co. for services to the committee in 2006 was $184,555,” Pfizer's proxy revealed. That works out to at least $15,000 a month just so the company can be certain that the wages and benefits of its top executives are well designed and competitive.
¶Other proxy statements appear to have been written by puzzle makers. Verizon's long-term incentive plan is one notable example. Over the last three years, Verizon investor returns were slightly above the median for its industry, but two out of every three big companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index performed better. How much did Verizon's performance program pay out? A handy chart would guide you to somewhere in the 41 percent range.
But the text of the proxy leads the careful reader to a different conclusion: the payout is closer to 82 percent of the amount the company actually expects to award annually. The percentages in the table are based on the maximum amount payable under Verizon's bonus plan — about twice the target level.
“Here they have a setup that allows them to get paid out fairly well based on beating, only slightly, the median for the telecom group even though it is D level performance over all,” he added.
His doctor had told him to have a weight-loss operation to reduce the amount of food his stomach could hold, worried because Mr. Orr, at 6 feet 2 inches, weighed 278 pounds. He also had a blood sugar level so high he was on the verge of diabetes and a strong family history of early death from heart attacks. And Mr. Orr, who is 44, had already had a heart attack in 1998 when he was 35.
But Mr. Orr had a secret plan. He had been quietly dieting and exercising for four months and lost 45 pounds. He envisioned himself proudly telling his doctor what he had done, sure his tests would show a huge drop in his blood sugar and cholesterol levels. He planned to confess that he had also stopped taking all of his prescription drugs for heart disease.
After all, he reasoned, with his improved diet and exercise, he no longer needed the drugs. And, anyway, he had never taken his medications regularly, so stopping altogether would not make much difference, he decided.
But the surprise was not what Mr. Orr had anticipated. On Feb. 6, one week before the appointment with his doctor, Mr. Orr was working out at a gym near his home in Boston when he felt a tightness in his chest. It was the start of a massive heart attack, with the sort of blockage in an artery that doctors call the widow-maker.
He survived, miraculously, with little or no damage to his heart. But his story illustrates the reasons that heart disease still kills more Americans than any other disease, as it has for nearly a century.
Medical research has revealed enough about the causes and prevention of heart attacks that they could be nearly eliminated. Yet nearly 16 million Americans are living with coronary heart disease, and nearly half a million die from it each year.
It's not that prevention doesn't work, and it's not that once someone has a heart attack there is little to be done. In fact, said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, age-adjusted death rates for heart disease dropped precipitously in the past few decades, and prevention and better treatment are major reasons why.
But the concern, Dr. Nabel and others say, is that much more could be done. In many ways, scientists' hard-won and increasingly detailed understanding of what causes heart disease and what to do for it often goes unknown or ignored.
Studies reveal, for example, that people have only about an hour to get their arteries open during a heart attack if they are to avoid permanent heart damage. Yet, recent surveys find, fewer than 10 percent get to a hospital that fast, sometimes because they are reluctant to acknowledge what is happening. And most who reach the hospital quickly do not receive the optimal treatment — many American hospitals are not fully equipped to provide it but are reluctant to give up heart patients because they are so profitable.
And new studies reveal that even though drugs can protect people who already had a heart attack from having another, many patients get the wrong doses and most, Mr. Orr included, stop taking the drugs in a matter of months. They should take the drugs for the rest of their lives.
Keith Orr's story has themes that resonate with every cardiologist. He did many things right, but also made some crucial miscalculations that were so common that nearly every patient makes them, cardiologists say. But not everyone comes out as well.
Mr. Orr anticipated a pleasant day on Feb. 6, starting with a workout at his gym, then lunch with a friend before he went to work at Smith & Wollensky, a steakhouse where he is a manager.
He arrived at the gym around noon and lifted weights, concentrating on the pectoral muscles of his chest. Then he moved on to an elliptical cross-trainer for cardiovascular exercise.
After half an hour on the elliptical, Mr. Orr felt a tightness in his chest. “I attributed it to the weight training,” he said, but stopped exercising, showered, dressed and walked to his car.
“I felt really bad, out of sorts,” he said. The pressure in his chest would ease off and then intensify, and now he was sweating profusely and was nauseated. When he arrived at the restaurant, he told his friend Darrin Friedman that he would have to beg off from lunch. “I feel like hell,” he told Mr. Friedman.
Mr. Orr called Mr. Friedman and asked him to drive him to an emergency room. A few minutes later, the two set off for Brigham and Women's Hospital, about a 10-minute drive.
When they arrived at the hospital's emergency department, Mr. Friedman explained that his friend was having chest pains. Immediately, Mr. Orr was wheeled off for an electrocardiogram, showing his heart's electrical signals. It was ominous, including one pattern called the tombstone T wave because patients who had it died in the days before there were aggressive treatments to open arteries.
The electrocardiogram was at 3:45 p.m., roughly 30 minutes after his symptoms changed from intermittent to constant and 5 minutes after he got to the hospital.
“Big M.I. coming in,” a nurse told Dr. Pande, using the abbreviation for myocardial infarction, or heart attack. At the time, the room was occupied — a patient was lying on the table for an elective procedure. He was quickly wheeled out and Mr. Orr was wheeled in. It was 3:56 p.m.
Within minutes, Dr. James M. Kirshenbaum, director of acute interventional cardiology, assisted by Dr. Pande, threaded a thin tube, like a long and narrow straw, from an artery in Mr. Orr's groin to his heart. They injected a dye to make Mr. Orr's arteries visible to an X-ray and they saw the problem — a huge clot in his heart's left anterior descending artery, blocking blood flow to most of his heart.
It worked — the balloon shattered the clot and pushed the debris against the artery wall and the stent held the artery open. Then a different problem arose. When the large clot was pushed aside, the debris was shoved against the opening of a small artery that branched from the larger one, much as a snowplow clearing a street can block a driveway.
“We made a calculated decision that it would be worth sacrificing the branch to secure the main vessel,” Dr. Pande said. But, fortunately, they were able to insert another balloon through the stent and into the small artery, opening it too.
Mr. Orr was incredibly lucky, said Dr. Elliott Antman, director of the coronary care unit at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He ended up with little or no damage to his heart, even though he teetered between lifesaving decisions and critical miscalculations in his moments of crisis.
The first lifesaving decision was to go to a hospital soon after his chest pain began. But the miscalculation was to call his friend for a ride. He should have called an ambulance.
Had his friend gotten caught in traffic, Mr. Orr might have been dead or sustained serious injury to his heart. He might have had to go to a rehabilitation center and learn special tactics for conserving energy, like sliding a coffeepot along a counter instead of lifting it.
But that urgency, cardiologists say, has been one of the most difficult messages to get across, in part because people often deny or fail to appreciate the symptoms of a heart attack. The popular image of a heart attack is all wrong.
Most patients describe something like Mr. Orr's symptoms — discomfort in the chest that may, or may not, radiate into the arms or neck, the back, the jaw, or the stomach. Many also have nausea or shortness of breath. Or they break out in a cold sweat, or have a feeling of anxiety or impending doom, or have blue lips or hands or feet, or feel a sudden exhaustion.
But symptoms often are less distinctive in elderly patients, especially women. Their only sign may be a sudden feeling of exhaustion just walking across a room. Some say they broke out in a sweat. Afterward, they may recall a feeling of pressure in their chest or pain radiating from their chest but at the time, they say, they paid little attention.
Patients with diabetes might have no obvious symptoms at all other than sudden, extreme fatigue. It's not clear why diabetics often have these so-called silent heart attacks — one hypothesis attributes it to damage diabetes can cause to nerves that carry pain signals.
Other times, said Dr. George Sopko, a cardiologist at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, symptoms like pressure in the chest come and go. That is because a blood clot blocking an artery is breaking up a bit, reforming, breaking and reforming. It was what happened to Mr. Orr when he was at the gym and meeting his friend afterward.
At least half of all patients never call an ambulance. Instead, in the throes of a heart attack, they drive themselves to the emergency room or are driven there by a friend or family member. Or they take a taxi. Or they walk.
“If you come to the hospital unannounced or if you drive yourself there, you're burning time,” Dr. Antman said. “And time is muscle,” he added, meaning that heart muscle is dying as the minutes tick away.
Calling an ambulance promptly is only part of the issue, heart researchers say. There also is the question of how, or even whether, the patient gets either of two types of treatment to open the blocked arteries, known as reperfusion therapy.
Stents have recently been questioned for those who are just having symptoms like shortness of breath. In those cases, drugs often work as well as stents. But during a heart attack or in the early hours afterward, stents are the best way to open arteries and prevent damage. That, though, requires a cardiac catheterization laboratory, practiced doctors and staff on call 24 hours a day. The result is that few get this treatment.
The ifs were not a problem for Mr. Orr. His decision to go to Brigham and Women's Hospital proved exactly right. But he did not know that when he chose the hospital — he chose it because his doctor was affiliated with Brigham.
Currently, 30 percent of patients who are candidates for reperfusion do not receive it, and of those who do, only 18 percent are treated with angioplasty, said Dr. Alice Jacobs, director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at Boston University School of Medicine and a past president of the American Heart Association. Of the nation's 5,000 acute care hospitals, Dr. Jacobs said, only 1,200 provide angioplasty.
Most hospitals, she said, cannot offer angioplasty because they do not have enough patients for a team of doctors to maintain their skills. An obvious solution would be to make heart attack care more like trauma care — sending patients to the nearest hospital that can provide angioplasty as quickly as possible. But that is not always easy, Dr. Jacobs said, because hospitals do not want to lose cardiac patients.
A major reason, she said, is financial. Hospitals are reimbursed by Medicare according an index that measures the acuity of medical conditions they treat.
“If your cardiac patients are transferred, your acuity index goes down, which lowers overall Medicare reimbursement for other problems like pneumonia and renal disease,” Dr. Jacobs said.
It is also difficult for patients who live in rural areas, where community hospitals are too small to offer angioplasty and larger hospitals that do offer it are hours away. Minnesota is experimenting with a program using helicopters to transport patients quickly. But for most rural patients elsewhere, angioplasty is almost an impossibility.
Dr. Antman suggests that heart disease patients ask their doctor if there is a hospital nearby that does angioplasty around the clock. If so, they might want to discuss with their doctor whether to ask that an ambulance take them there if they are having a heart attack.
Opening an artery is only the start of treatment. The next part is at least as problematic: Patients have to get the right drugs, in the right doses, and have to take them for the rest of their lives.
For example, he said, a recent study found that heart attack patients were getting blood-thinning prescription drugs to prevent clots, as they should, but up to 40 percent were getting the wrong dose, usually one too high.
And even if every prescription were exactly right, as many as half of all patients do just what Mr. Orr did after his first heart attack. They stop taking many or all of their drugs.
Mr. Orr said he did not like to think of himself as someone who had to take a fistful of pills every day. Even the recommended daily aspirin seemed superfluous, he thought.
What it does is make blood less likely to clot. In Mr. Orr's case, Dr. Antman said, it is likely that when Mr. Orr was exercising on the cross-trainer, an area of plaque ruptured. Then a clot began to form in the area, eventually blocking the artery.
The problem was not exercise, which is good for people with heart disease, but Mr. Orr's decision not to take his medications, Dr. Antman said. If he had been taking aspirin that clot would have had more difficulty forming and growing.
Dr. Antman has a message for patients: With a disease as serious as heart disease, those who take responsibility are often the ones who survive.
Now Mr. Orr plans to be serious about taking his medication and getting back to his diet and exercise program. He will call an ambulance if he ever has symptoms again. Still, he hates to think of himself as a patient. “I'm a little freaked out that I will have to take medication for the foreseeable eternity,” Mr. Orr said.
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