re: Trivia - back pain diagnosis leads to heart surgery

What I bet happened was the surgeons asked for a “cardiac clearance”. The cardiologist will then do a history looking for signs of unstable heart disease such as chest pain indicative of coronary disease, unstable arrhythmias or valvular disorders. Some cardiologists will blanket order stress tests on all these pre-op patients. Sometimes this leads to heart caths to define coronary anatomy and really what they are looking for is critical coronary disease in need of revascularization prior to non-cardiac surgery, hence why it’s felt that someone needed bypass and/or valve surgery prior to back surgery. It happens often.