Radio Host Grateful to be Alive after Unexpected Heart Surgery (PKG)

CLEVELAND – For more than 40 years, Mark ‘Munch’ Bishop has been gracing the airwaves as a radio host, talking all things sports. But, last year his career almost came to an end.

“I was losing my voice. I would lose my voice a day or two every week,” recalls Munch.

Concerned, he went to Cleveland Clinic to get checked out and discovered he had a non-cancerous polyp on his vocal cord, which would need to be surgically removed.

“We had to go through a pre-test to see what kind of anesthesia I could handle and things like that once I had the throat surgery, and low and behold, throat surgery turned into open heart surgery,” he said.

Munch said during the exam, a nurse practitioner noticed something unusual with his heart, so additional testing was conducted.

“We did an echocardiogram and it didn’t look quite normal, so he had a heart catheterization done, to which all of our surprise since he had no symptoms, showed he had a blockage in the main artery on the heart,” said Nicholas Smedira, MD, cardiothoracic surgeon for Cleveland Clinic.

Munch was in disbelief at first and quickly realized it was a matter of life and death.

“I was never worried at all about having the operation — that it would fail,” he said.

And he was right. Dr. Smedira said the more than six hour surgery went well.

“Bypasses are fairly straightforward, but we had to do an operation where we replaced his aortic valve and the entire aorta, and that’s a big operation,” Dr. Smedira explained.

Munch is now back at work, grateful to the nurse practitioner who first noticed something was wrong.

He said without her, he probably wouldn’t be here today.

“She in fact saved my life, and I am indebted to her for as long as I’ll be around,” he said.